


across that great divide

by boo98 (butter)



Category: Monsta X (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Road Trip, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Misunderstandings, Pining, Stupid Boys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 15:18:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12460470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butter/pseuds/boo98
Summary: Hyungwon was taller than him in this position, and he tipped his head down just enough to press his cheek against the crown of Hyunwoo’s head as he let out a breathy huff of air. “It’s dumb that I don’t really want to go back, right?”Hyunwoo blinked, but couldn’t look over at him because Hyungwon’s head was still on top of his. “We don’t have to go anywhere, right now.”Hyungwon was quiet for another long moment, and Hyunwoo just had to watch his fingers pull and twist together in his lap.Then, “Let’s stay in Chicago for a few days.”





	across that great divide

They left from Hyunwoo’s apartment at almost five in the morning, with the sky just barely shifting into a grey-blue from the rising spring sun. Hyungwon had spent the night on Hyunwoo’s kind of shitty couch in preparation for the early morning departure, so he’d just had to roll over and out the door when Hyunwoo finally gave in and shook him awake. Their stuff was mostly packed into Hyunwoo’s trunk, so Hyungwon just crawled into the backseat before they left.

“Give me like thirty more minutes,” Hyungwon grumbled and curled his legs up so he was twisted around in the seat, spine bumping against the window and side leaning on the back of the seat. “It’s early.”

Hyunwoo let himself chuckle a bit as he pulled out of his apartment complex and onto the main street, which was just starting to come awake with early-morning commuters. “You’re not allowed to sleep the whole time, you know, that’s the deal. I drive and you DJ.”

Hyungwon made a sound that was somewhere between assent and a snore, and then quieted for the next hour while Hyunwoo idly clicked through the radio and made their way to the highway.

They managed to sneak just ahead of the rush hour leaving the city, and then they were just going. Hyunwoo tapped his fingers against the steering wheel lightly, and tried and failed not to think too hard about what they were doing.

He was technically on spring break right now, he assured himself. Just because he had a huge section of his dissertation that he really, really should be working on, didn’t mean that he had license to say no to Hyungwon when he called a few days ago and suggested this whole thing.

The conversation had been… weird. It wasn’t like Hyunwoo hadn’t had stranger conversations with Hyungwon at some point before that, though, and it _had_ been close to three in the morning.

Hyungwon had been out with a handful of his friends from work, and the only reason he’d gotten Hyunwoo and not his voice mail had been thanks to a pile of papers that he had been working on grading for the class he TA’d.

“Hey,” Hyungwon said, voice husky in the way it got after a certain point in a night of drinking when he started yelling at people to change the music. “You’re graduating soon.”

“Yeah,” Hyunwoo had replied, proud for making it not sound like too much of a question. “I mean, I hope I am.”

Hyungwon had snorted and paused for a second on the other end of the line, leaving Hyunwoo to cap his pen and stare a little blankly at the wall behind his desk as if Hyungwon could see his quizzical expression. “D’you wanna do something?”

“What?” Hyunwoo glanced at the time display at the top of his laptop screen, which was sitting to the side of the pile of essays, page still opened to an email from his advisor. “Do what?”

“We should go somewhere.” There was the muffled sound of laughter on the other end of the line, along with a few thuds and a distant jingle of bells. Then, the sound mostly faded out, leaving just Hyungwon’s breath in his ear and the occasional honking of a car. “Like, on a trip. You have your break coming up, right?”

“It’s next week, yeah.”

“We present our final thing to the board on Friday,” Hyungwon said, and something clicked metallically in the background of his words. Hyungwon had a habit of borrowing people’s lighters, he remembered, and the heaviness of Hyungwon’s next exhale confirmed Hyunwoo’s suspicion. “Then I’m taking some vacation, since it’ll be as calm as it ever is. Let’s go somewhere.”

“Like where?” Hyunwoo had this tendency to get sucked into the things that Hyungwon said, especially when everything outside was dark and Hyungwon’s voice was raspy with smoke and the late hour.

“Anywhere. Or, I have a few places, I dunno.” A pause, and Hyunwoo imagined he could hear the way that Hyungwon leaned against a wall outside the bar and held his cigarette between two thin fingers, far enough away from him that the ash wouldn’t drop on his dark jeans. “I just kind of feel like getting away from things for a bit.”

“And you don’t mind me going too?”

Hyunwoo probably could have predicted the way that Hyungwon snorted a little in laughter at that. “Which one of us has a car?”

There was another moment of quiet, long enough for Hyunwoo to wonder if he was supposed to answer that question before Hyungwon spoke again. “I think it’d be fun, I guess. You might be one of the only people that I could spend over three hours in the car with and not go absolutely batshit.”

Hyunwoo laughed at that, leaning forward on his desk with both elbows and pressing his phone just a little closer to his ear. “It might be way longer than three hours, you know. Will I be counting on you to navigate?”

“That’s what phone GPS’s are for.” And that had been mostly it, honestly. They had veered to Hyungwon complaining light-heartedly about the friends he had gone out with that night, who had both been distracted early on by a table of pretty undergrads across the room of the second bar that they went to and, according to Hyungwon, had all but abandoned him.

By the time Hyunwoo hung up it was closer to five, and when he checked his phone again his alarm was set to go off in less than an hour. The essays weren’t done, and he felt the beginnings of a sleep-deprived migraine sinking in behind his eyes, but he couldn’t say he was in a bad mood when he plugged his phone back into the charger and picked his pen back up.

Now, Hyunwoo had just clicked the turn signal off after merging onto a new stretch of highway when Hyungwon finally showed signs of life in the backseat again. “Sleep alright?” Hyunwoo asked, peeking at the rearview mirror just in time to watch Hyungwon push his hands through his hair and wince, eyes shut still.

“’Time is it?” Hyungwon replied, voice smushed-sounding with sleep as he clicked his seatbelt off and all but folded himself in half to try to climb up into the passenger’s side front seat.

Hyunwoo glanced at the dashboard clock. “Almost seven.”

“This is the worst,” Hyungwon shot back, voice flat even as Hyunwoo caught his lips quirking up once he managed to get seated. “Do you still want to wait ‘til after food to switch driving?”

Hyunwoo shrugged. “Whatever you want.” Hyungwon wasn’t a bad driver, but he liked to bend his left leg all the way up into the seat like a folding chair while his right foot worked the pedals. It made Hyunwoo just a little nervous.

Hyungwon hummed and flicked his phone unlocked, squirming in the seat until he was comfortable. Hyunwoo’s car wasn’t fancy, just a used sedan that he’d gotten over six years ago now, back when he started undergrad, but he kept it in good shape. It had leather seats and about a dozen different gum wrappers shoved in the cup holders and side door pockets from Hyungwon, and the A/C worked fine.

They drove for a little while, with the window cracked just enough to ruffle Hyungwon’s hair and keep things from being too still inside the car. Hyunwoo was just kind of heading south – he hadn’t gotten any clear directions from Hyungwon yet.

Hyungwon, when they’d first met back in undergrad, had always done things like this. Hyunwoo hadn’t thought he’d even liked him until they had known each other for almost two years, because Hyungwon’s tendency was to be always a little closed-off and independent.

They had been acquaintances, and coworkers for the one semester that Hyungwon tried to work in the campus library with Hyunwoo before giving up, but somewhere along the line something must have changed because here they were now.

Hyunwoo was almost through grad school, while Hyungwon had been working for a few years, and they hadn’t lost touch yet. It helped that they still lived mostly in the same area, although Hyungwon commuted a decent distance to be more in the city, but it also just had never had a chance to fall through, really.

Hyungwon clicked the lock button on his phone in the seat next to Hyunwoo and turned a bit to look out the window. “It’s a nice day.”

“Yeah,” Hyunwoo responded. The sun was high now, getting closer to nine in the morning, and the sky was a pretty blue. “What’s the plan, anyways?”

Hyungwon shrugged, shoulders bony through the shirt he had on. “We could go to the beach?”

“The beach?” Hyunwoo didn’t love sand, but Hyungwon was a little like a lizard – he got content and better-natured in the warm weather, and it felt like securing that was important right then. “Sure. Let’s do that.”

They drove through Virginia, stopping at a Cracker Barrel for something in between breakfast and lunch. Hyunwoo drank coffee and Hyungwon snickered at the novelty aprons in the gift shop at the front of the store, pulling at the strings and joking about buying one.

They kept going. Hyunwoo still drove, because he insisted, and Hyungwon didn’t fight that too much. He flipped the air conditioning on a little higher, though, as the sun got stronger through the windshield, and Hyunwoo didn’t say anything about wasting energy considering they still had the window cracked

The roads weren’t bad, especially once they got further into Virginia and then even more south, away from larger cities. They talked about things like Hyungwon’s coworkers and the courses that Hyunwoo taught then, but for the most part they let silence wash over them, alongside the music that Hyungwon kept flipping through.

Eventually, they hit South Carolina, and after a certain point Hyungwon told Hyunwoo to take the next exit, partly on a whim and partly pointing to the increased number of tourist spots listed on the ‘local attraction’ signs at the side of the highway.

They ended up in a small beach town, just popular enough considering the time of year for it to be bustling with families and some college students, but mostly full of retirees.

“What about there?” Hyungwon asked, window rolled fully down now so he could lean his elbow out the frame and point at a small blue beach house with a vacancy sign by the side of the road. “Looks like a bed and breakfast thing.”

Hyunwoo nodded and turned into the small drive when they reached it. “It’s cute.” Hyungwon smirked a little but it was true – it had light blue siding and white window sills and a red door, and when they walked in a thin, older woman greeted them at her desk.

“We only really have one extra room,” she said, finger tapping on the keyboard of an ancient-looking desktop computer perched on the corner of the table, half-forgotten. “It’s two twins, if that’s fine?”

Hyunwoo nodded, because Hyungwon was distracted and paging through the guest book absent-mindedly. “That’s fine.”

They’re handed a metal key instead of any kind of plastic key card, and when they got upstairs and to the room Hyungwon wasted no time in dumping his suitcase onto one of the beds. “Let’s go to the beach,” he said, unzipping his bag.

Hyunwoo glanced out the window, which showed the street outside and the ocean in the distance, glinting in the light of the impending sunset. “Do you want to get dinner, first?”

Hyungwon shrugged, shoulder blades jutting out of his thin back, which he had turned to Hyunwoo as he yanked his shirt off and pulled a different, looser t-shirt on. “Up to you, I’m not hungry.”

Hyunwoo was reminded, a little nervously, of the moods that Hyungwon would get in during his own senior year of undergrad, where he smoked during the day and ate maybe one meal every 24 hours. “I am, kind of. We can just get, like, fast food, and then go to the beach.”

Hyungwon shrugged again but sat mostly patiently as Hyunwoo hopped on his side of the small room, changing from his sneakers to a pair of slipper-style sandals that Hyungwon always raised his eyebrow at, but didn’t comment on for once.  

They wandered towards the public section of the beach and grabbed sandwiches from a place on the way, plus two towels from a neon-lighted beach store. “It’s an investment,” Hyungwon said when Hyunwoo made a noise at how expensive they were. “You’ll be glad a year from now that you own a beach towel, just wait.”

“I don’t know what kind of life you expect me to be living then,” Hyunwoo remarked, but paid for his own towel just the same. “The glamorous life of a teacher doesn’t involve a ton of beach days.”

“You could lifeguard in the summers, who knows?” Hyungwon bumped against Hyunwoo’s shoulder as they left, although it wasn’t enough to budge him much, probably not as much as Hyungwon had wanted. “I think that’d be a good look on you.”

Hyunwoo couldn’t help but flush a little, although he only felt it in his ears, and Hyungwon didn’t seem to notice as they continue down the street. They cut to the left and then found themselves right up against the beach, which was all but emptied out completely.

“Kind of thought there’d be more people,” Hyunwoo muttered, picking his way down the sand after he kicks his sandals off and just carries them, food in the other hand. “It’s getting to be that time of year.”

“It’s more of a migrated crowd here, I think.” Hyungwon had both hands in his pockets, towel slung over his shoulder and sandwich being carried by Hyunwoo. “The dinner at 5, in bed at 7 type.”

“Sounds nice.”

“That’s for sure.”

The ocean made a soothing backdrop of sound, the waves crashing gently on the beach, which in turn was softer than Hyunwoo had maybe anticipated. It didn’t get rocky and shelly until you were right up on the tide, and the two of them stayed a bit further back to put their towels down on the sand.

Hyungwon folded himself down to sit with all his usual grace. It always startled Hyunwoo, just a bit, that someone with legs that long and skinny could manage to not look like a baby deer whenever he moved.

Hyunwoo, for his part, sat cross-legged and leaned back on the heels of his hands. It was silent, for a bit, as Hyungwon picked at his sandwich and ate Hyunwoo’s chips.

“Thanks,” Hyungwon finally said, eyes fixed on a point down the beach away from Hyunwoo. The deepening orange of the sunset cast interesting shadows against Hyungwon’s collarbones. “I know this kind of seems like a crazy thing to do.”

Hyunwoo shrugged. “It’s alright. I wasn’t going to do much at home anyways.”

“No, I mean - ” Hyungwon huffed and glanced at him out of the corner of his eyes. “I know you’re not usually, like, the most impulsive guy.”

Hyunwoo wasn’t sure if that was an insult or not. “I – I can be impulsive.”

Hyungwon rolled his eyes but grinned fondly just the same, and threw a potato chip Hyunwoo’s way. “Sure, ok, sorry. We all applaud you and your willingness to sometimes buy jeans _without_ trying them on first. You wild card.” He snorted a laugh out when Hyunwoo shoved him in the arm for that remark, and let the momentum carry him so he flopped down on his back. “Still, thanks. I think I was just going a little stir-crazy.”

“Really? Why?”

“Dunno.” Hyungwon squinted up at the sky, lips pursed familiarly. “I guess it’s just been kinda hectic at work and stuff. You know how it is.”

“I guess.” Hyunwoo gave in and laid down too, and crossed his arms on his chest. “You’ve seemed like there’s been a lot on your mind, lately, kind of.”

“Have I?” Hyungwon quieted, and when Hyunwoo looked over at him he was blinking up at the sky absently. “I guess you could say that.” His lips thinned more, in a frown, and Hyunwoo’s chest tightened. Maybe he shouldn’t have brought that up.

It was true, though. Before Hyungwon had called him that one night (or, more accurately, morning), Hyunwoo hadn’t heard from him in at least a week, and anything before that had been mostly short texts. They weren’t usually distant like that, but Hyungwon _had_ been busy lately, Hyunwoo supposed. He tended to get touchy when he was stressed, too, and he’d had deadlines at work. It probably wasn’t anything too important.

Besides, if bringing it up just made Hyungwon go all tight and quiet like he was now, it probably wasn’t worth it.

They laid there for a little while longer, and after a few minutes Hyungwon’s posture relaxed measurably. He laughed rustily when Hyunwoo eventually made a show of trying to sit up, complaining about his back, and called him an old man.

“This’ll be you in a year,” Hyunwoo said, but smiled anyways. “Look forward to it.”

Hyungwon grinned at him from his spot on the towel still, and for the first time since they’d gotten in the car that morning his eyes thinned and curved up the way they did when he really smiled. “You don’t think that, of the two of us, I’m definitely the one that’ll age more gracefully? I’ve seen the hairline on your dad, you’re in for it.”

That earned him another shove from Hyunwoo, which only got Hyunwoo sand in his mouth as payback, and then Hyungwon bugged him into loping down to the waterline, leaving their stuff behind on the sand.

Hyunwoo was still in jeans but Hyungwon had changed into shorts that showed off his bony ankles and thin calves, so he wandered further into the ocean while Hyunwoo hung back enough to just get his feet wet.  

The sun was almost completely set by now, although the sky was still a dusty blue and light enough out to see fairly well. Hyunwoo shoved his hands in his pockets and watched the water lap over his feet, burying them slowly deeper into the sand until he had to lean down and roll his jean cuffs up a few times.

When he straightened back up, Hyungwon had walked out into the water so that the breaks of the waves were rolling in almost to his knees. He was just far enough away that the details of his form were blurred from the dim light, looking more like a silhouette against the last smudges of orange and pink in the distance than anything else.

As Hyunwoo watched Hyungwon turned, just a bit, and glanced over his shoulder. He looked even taller and slimmer in the dark lighting, but the high planes of his face caught the last of the sun and held it in a warm glow. Hyungwon didn’t say anything, just seemed to make sure that Hyunwoo was still there, then turned back to look out across the water.

They headed back to the bed and breakfast when the sky got closer to navy and the moon drifted out from behind some clouds. Hyungwon whipped his towel to dust it off and laughed when Hyunwoo just got more sand in his mouth, and the last bits of the strange, introspective look in his eyes was completely faded by the time they got back to the main street.

Hyunwoo flipped on the small TV in their room when they got back, tuned it to ESPN while Hyungwon no doubt steamed up the attached bathroom with his shower.

His phone had died while they were at the beach since Hyungwon had hogged the car charger for the whole trip, and when it finally turned back on again he had a handful of texts, which was a whole handful more than he usually had.

The first one he opened was from Hoseok – _“Want to tell me why I just found out that you and Hyungwon eloped?”._

Then, another one from only a minute later. _“I’m progressive, dude, I wouldn’t have judged. I could have been the flower girl at least.”_ That one had a little emoticon of a bouquet of flowers added at the end.

Hyunwoo snorted and leaned against the backboard of the bed he had claimed. His feet reached almost to the end of the bed even sitting up, which didn’t spell good news for how he was going to sleep that night, but it was alright. _“We just went to the beach. I would have invited you, but it was kind of a last minute thing.”_

The other text was from his mom, and Hyunwoo was halfway through a response to her (just normal checking-in things, because she was sweet and liked to know that he was alive) when Hoseok replied.

_“That’s alright, I wouldn’t want to crash things anyways. How is he?”_

Hyunwoo paused, thumb hovering over the keyboard on his phone screen. Hoseok didn’t know Hyungwon that well – he had met Hyunwoo in grad school, and Hyungwon was just kind of the friend of a friend that he sometimes got drinks with. Hoseok was a good guy, though, and they seemed to get along well.

Still, that was an unexpected question. _“He’s fine. He just needed a vacation, I think, and he decided to drag me along.”_ Hyunwoo debated whether that sounded too negative before huffing and sending it anyways. It wasn’t like he was mad about any of this situation, he had gone along with it easily. Still.

The noise of the shower turned off in the bathroom and Hyunwoo glanced over when the door opened. Hyungwon shuffled out, skinny chest bare but wearing a pair of loose sweatpants that bunched up too-long over his feet.

“Hey,” he grumbled, pushing his wet hair off his forehead and scrubbing at it with a towel while he wandered over to his bed. “Anything good on?”

Hyunwoo looked back at the television, which he had kind of forgotten was on. “Um. Not really, I’m not actually watching it.” He offered the remote to Hyungwon, who took it before flopping down on his own bed and pulling a shirt on over his head. “Shower fine?”

Hyungwon’s head popped out of the stretched collar of his t-shirt and he shot a look at Hyunwoo. “Yeah? Kind of normal, for a shower.” He stretched his arms up high above his head, remote hanging loosely from his fingertips, and Hyunwoo was a little grateful when his phone buzzed in his hand and distracted him from the thin slip of stomach that showed when Hyungwon’s shirt ran up from the motion.

_“Cool. Have fun, then, don’t get burnt.”_

“Someone’s popular.” Hyungwon’s mouth quirked up when Hyunwoo looked back at him, but then he looked away to flip through the TV channels, which were half-static. “Everything alright?”

“Yeah. Just my mom, you know, that stuff.”

Hyungwon hummed and seemed to settle on a station, which was playing some movie from the 90’s that Hyunwoo should probably know but didn’t. The movie was halfway through already, but it wasn’t like it took a ton of insight to get a general understanding of the plot, and by the time it was over Hyunwoo’s eyelids were drooping.

Hyungwon seemed to agree, and his jaw cracked when he yawned and turned the television off. “I almost forgot how early we got up today,” he mumbled, and rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. “Sorry you had to drive that whole time, geez, you should have complained.”

Hyunwoo huffed a laugh out and stood to make his own way over to wash up. “It’s fine, I like driving.”

“Sure, sure, I still think you’re just scared I’ll wreck your darling car.”

“You wouldn’t wreck it. I just don’t think I can make the chair go back far enough to accommodate your grasshopper legs.” Hyungwon swatted at Hyunwoo as he walked past but wasn’t quite quick enough to make contact.

Hyungwon had clicked the light off by the time Hyunwoo was done in the bathroom, although the small room was still dimly lit by the light from the streetlamps outside. Hyungwon was in his usual ball of covers, legs bent up into a semi-fetal position to accommodate the length of the bed. His hair was still damp, although the very ends looked like they were curling a little against the pillow.

Hyunwoo climbed into bed, trying for the least amount of noise, and inadvertently mirrored Hyungwon’s position. The bed wasn’t as short as it could be, but it still wasn’t the most comfortable thing.

He thought idly about closing the curtains to block out the light more, but the idea of waking up with the sunrise was kind of nice. He fell asleep to the dim sound of the town traffic, and to Hyungwon’s breaths growing slowly more and more raspy.

 

Hyunwoo woke up first the next morning, obviously, and he was showered and dressed and texting his mom idly by the time Hyungwon even stirred.

“’S bright,” he mumbled into his pillow, and Hyunwoo only even understood him thanks to his years of experience of translating Hyungwon’s particular language of sleep-slurred speech.

“It’s a nice day outside,” Hyunwoo said lightly, and couldn’t help but smile at the noise Hyungwon made as he burrowed further into his covers. “I might go grab coffee and breakfast.”

“Don’t they do breakfast here?” Hyungwon asks, sliding almost entirely under his comforter.

“I think they stop at 9, and I don’t want to try to bring anything back for you from them anyways.” The lady at the front desk had been perfectly sweet, but Hyunwoo thought it might be a bit rude to show up asking for a takeout container, and it didn’t seem like Hyungwon was going anywhere soon. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

Hyungwon grumbled a goodbye as Hyunwoo left, making sure to take the key with him along with his wallet and phone.

It was a nice day out, and the breeze off the ocean chased away the creeping heat from the sun rising higher. He ended up finding a coffee shop that sold pastries and stuff, and he got a few different things along with coffee for himself. Hyungwon didn’t drink much coffee, ultimately just preferring to sleep, but Hyunwoo still grabbed him a cold brew.

“That was quick,” Hyungwon called out when he got back to the room, arms full with coffee and a box of muffins. Hyungwon was actually out of bed, which was kind of impressive, and he cast a look down at the box in Hyunwoo’s arms. “Wanna go back to the beach?”

They stopped at the same tourist store again to buy swim trunks, since neither of them had really thought to pack them before leaving. They changed in the tiny changing rooms in the back of the store and then headed to the beach with just their towels and Hyunwoo’s backpack.

The beach wasn’t crowded, with just a scattering of families with young kids setting up their own chairs and umbrellas. Hyunwoo followed Hyungwon to a spot around where they had been last night, albeit a little further back as the tide came in.

Hyunwoo pulled his shirt off in deference to the creeping heat, while Hyungwon ate a muffin in pinches and kept his tank top on, staring out at the ocean.

It was peaceful, mostly, beyond the occasional gull that decided to try and get some of their breakfast. They ate everything in short order, though, so that particular issue didn’t last.

It was kind of embarrassing, how regularly Hyunwoo found himself checking on Hyungwon. It wasn’t more than a quick glance, but he couldn’t help but do it every few minutes even as they sat in comfortable silence, warming in the sun.

Something about Hoseok’s text last night mixed with the sight of Hyungwon blurred and silhouetted against the setting sun in Hyunwoo’s thoughts and put him in the mindset of worrying.

How was Hyungwon? Hyunwoo, for the first time in a while, wasn’t sure if he exactly knew.

Hyungwon, for his part, was fairly quiet that whole morning and into the afternoon. He complied easily when Hyunwoo nudged him towards sunscreen and, later, lunch, but other than that didn’t do too much. Hyungwon always tended towards napping in the sun rather than actually going in the ocean, though, so it wasn’t something to necessarily be concerned about.

Still, though.

That night Hyungwon bullied Hyunwoo into going to one of the beachfront bars, a typically cheesy tiki-type thing that was full of retirees that looked like they owned more than one motorcycle.

They sat at the bar and watched the football game that was on the one TV, posted up high in the corner of the place. Hyunwoo nursed two beers total while Hyungwon collected souvenir cups of primarily blue drinks, and it was comfortable.

At some point the place got smoky and quiet, as most of the people there started trickling out. It was only eleven or so, and Hyunwoo recognized the look in Hyungwon’s eyes that said he wasn’t quite done with the night yet.

They paid their tabs finally, with Hyungwon shifting from foot to foot like he was liable to go sprint off at any moment. Without really saying anything they continued out into the street and then the boardwalk that ran against the beach, which was lit with streetlamps but otherwise dark and empty.

The wind off the ocean was stronger that night, and ruffled Hyungwon’s hair while it threatened to knock off the baseball cap that Hyunwoo had put on earlier that day. Hyungwon was just in a short-sleeved shirt and jeans, while Hyunwoo had grabbed a jacket before they left their room after coming back in finally from the beach.

The wind picked up and Hyungwon shivered, hands stuffed in his pockets, and Hyunwoo repressed the strange instinct to wrap an arm around him and rub at his bare arm. He hadn’t had that much to drink at all, really, but the moment felt still and fragile. It seemed as if any spare motion would ripple the surface of it irreparably, like stepping into a tide pool and disturbing the life hidden there.

They ended up finding a bench at the edge of the boardwalk, facing towards the dark beach and the sound of the ocean. Hyungwon sat a bit closer to Hyunwoo that usual, although the way he leaned just a little into his side probably hinted towards his instinct to move into warmth.

Nothing else, obviously, Hyunwoo reminded himself, not sure why this whole issue was rearing its head again. They’d been friends for years; he thought he was over the squirmy feeling that balled up in his stomach whenever Hyungwon got particularly near.

They sat in silence, Hyungwon’s legs stretched long in front of him.

“Where d’you think we go next?” Hyungwon asked finally, breaking the hush although his voice stayed low. He was turned out towards the ocean still, and when Hyunwoo looked at him his eyes were hazed over and his lips were blue at the center from his drinks. It was awfully endearing.

“Next?”

Hyungwon rolled his head over a bit to give Hyunwoo an unfairly sardonic look, in his opinion. “Yeah, next. It’s not a road trip if we just go one place, you know.”

“I didn’t realize there were rules to this kind of thing.” Hyunwoo leaned further into the bench and propped his elbows against the back, which seemed to give Hyungwon license to inch just slightly closer. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it much.”

Hyungwon blinked at him, the movement slow and dreary although his eyes were sparkling against the streetlamps and alert all of a sudden. His lashes were long, up close like this. “I’ll think of something, then.” His mouth curled up at the corners, but it wasn’t quite a smile, and he turned back to the ocean as Hyunwoo’s mind turned towards thoughts of cliff sides, and the swooping feeling you get when you miss a step on the stairs.

They stayed at the bed and breakfast for another day, following an almost identical schedule of sitting on the beach and not doing much else. Hyungwon seemed to relax, a bit, and Hyunwoo didn’t feel so much like he was dragging words out of him when he did talk.

It rained in the afternoon of that second day, and they took cover under another outdoor bar where they could look out at the beach and watch a stray seagull or two peck at the sand.

“It’s nice down here,” Hyungwon said at one point in the evening, as the sun set over the waves and he worked on his third drink with an umbrella in it. “Quiet.”

“Yeah.” Hyunwoo had his beer pushed away from him on the counter so he had room to cross his arms and prop his elbows against the wood. Hyungwon leaned into him enough that he could feel the heat of his slightly-sunburnt skin through the thin fabric of his shirt.

Hyungwon messed with the straw in his drink, bending it back and forth until the red plastic had gone completely white along the folding seam. “I think I know where I want to go after this.”

He didn’t elaborate immediately when Hyunwoo turned more fully towards him, just stuck his straw in his mouth and chewed on it for a bit. Finally, after another few minutes, he pressed on his phone to unlock it and tapped at the screen a few times before tipping it towards Hyunwoo.

It was on a text conversation between Hyungwon and someone that had been saved in his contacts as ‘Honey~’, which Hyunwoo figured might be the mysterious Honey’s doing. He was pretty sure that he was still in Hyungwon’s contacts as ‘Hyunwoo from Poli Sci 103’.

Hyungwon tapped on the most recent incoming message, which looked like an address for somewhere in Chicago and a little emoticon of a shooting star tagged onto the end. “It’s my friend from school’s apartment. He invited us to come visit, if we wanted to, and he’ll show us around.”

“Friend from school?” Hyunwoo shifted closer to see the screen better, and Hyungwon didn’t move away as their shoulders bumped. “Chicago’s kind of a drive.”

“We can take our time.” Hyungwon swiped away from the conversation and locked his phone again, then propped his chin on his hand so he could turn and look at Hyunwoo. “I’ve never been to Chicago, and it’d be nice to see him.”

Hyunwoo swallowed, feeling a little caught in Hyungwon’s stare as he seemed to regard him. In the end he couldn’t help but sigh lightly and tip his beer in cheers towards Hyungwon. “Okay. Chicago it is, then.”

 

Hyunwoo ended up driving again. They left the bed and breakfast in the morning, although they didn’t feel in much of a rush. Hyunwoo stopped to buy his mom a magnet at the beach store that had lots of flowers and fish on it, and Hyungwon shot him a close-lipped smile but didn’t say anything.

“You didn’t know him, but you’ll like him,” Hyungwon said as they pulled onto the main road, leaning his head out of the window like a dog and letting the wind whip at his hair. They were just picking up speed then, rolling by sleepy houses and gas stations. “His name’s Jooheon – he’s a year younger than me, so I didn’t meet him ‘til you had already graduated.”

“And he’s out in Chicago already?” Hyunwoo asked.

Hyungwon made an affirming noise and then finally pulled his upper body back inside the car so he could close the window as they veered onto the highway proper. “He’s out trying to make it big with his friend’s music label.” Hyungwon snorted but it was thick with fondness, and Hyunwoo was already getting an idea of the kind of person that this Jooheon must be, for Hyungwon to sound like that. “He’s an ambitious guy.”

“Seems like it.”

They stopped for gas about two hours into the drive, and then Hyungwon finally deigned to try to bully Hyunwoo out of the driver’s seat.

“You need to get a bigger car,” he groused as he adjusted the mirrors before they pulled out of the parking lot. “We look like we’re in a clown car with this thing.”

Hyunwoo shrugged and watched Hyungwon fiddle with the seat one last time. “I like it. It has character. It still works fine, anyways.”

Hyungwon shot him an irritated glance but went ahead driving anyways.

They moved back into North Carolina and then into West Virginia, and by the time it was nearing evening Hyungwon had put Hyunwoo on motel-finding duty.

“It doesn’t have to be fancy or anything,” Hyungwon said, lip pulled up at the corner as he passed a slow minivan. “We just need beds and a parking space, really.”

Hyunwoo ended up picking a mostly random exit that led them to a motel, the kind that still put the fact that they had heating and air conditioning as a selling point on their sign.

The room they got was obviously out of date but not as sketchy as Hyungwon said he thought it might be – it was another two beds, both full size this time, and a small box television set on a rickety table.

“We’re just keeping in our tradition so far of only staying in cozy places,” Hyungwon quipped, pulling the sheets back on the bed to inspect it as if he would find a blood stain or something right there.

“I guess cozy is one way to put it.”

That night, after a shower in the bathroom where only a few tiles were cracked at the edges, Hyunwoo found Hyungwon perched on the railing of the porch outside their room. He was fiddling with a pack of cigarettes but hadn’t lit any of them, and when Hyunwoo moved to lean on the railing next to him Hyungwon just turned to him with half-lidded eyes.

“Joining?” Hyungwon asked.

“Don’t think so.” Hyunwoo tapped his fingers on the railing, which was made of thin metal painted white and chipping already under his hands. “I doubt it could hold both our weight.”

Hyungwon sniffed, and squirmed so he could shove the smashed pack of cigarettes back into his pocket. “Are you calling me fat?”

“No,” Hyunwoo said, already kind of regretting coming outside after him. “Just, never mind. What are you doing out here?”

Hyungwon shrugged, and the movement was rattling with nails and sharp edges and the sudden, tense feeling that Hyungwon wished he wasn’t there either. “Fresh air. It’s stuffy in there.”

The room had been overly-chilled with the air conditioning, in Hyunwoo’s opinion, but he didn’t say anything.

For as long as they had known each other it always took him off-guard when Hyungwon got in one of these moods. Most of the time he was just a little bratty and stubborn, too independent to want to deal with most people, but he didn’t usually get this down.

They ended up sitting in silence, broken occasionally by a car pulling too-fast by the motel on the main street and the sound of a loud conversation down the line of rooms from them.

Hyungwon didn’t move towards his pocket for as long as they were out there. Instead, he shot Hyunwoo a few glances that seemed thick with some meaning that Hyunwoo couldn’t translate.

Hyunwoo didn’t know where to begin, really, so he just stood next to Hyungwon and let him shift close enough to brush their sides together after a few minutes. It was what he was used to doing – Hyunwoo was the sturdy one, the one that kept Hyungwon from completely flickering out the way he seemed ready to do sometimes.

It was stupidly nostalgic of him, but Hyunwoo couldn’t help but start a little when a firefly lit up in the bushes near the railing. As if feeling his movement, Hyungwon leaned forward and cupped the dull yellow light in one of his hands, the other one still gripping on the fence.

Hyungwon pulled back and adjusted to hold the bug with both hands, and instinctively Hyunwoo pressed a hand to the small of his back, making sure he kept his balance. Hyungwon’s skin was chilled through his t-shirt.

“Hey there.” Hyungwon opened his hands a little, enough to get a sliver of light through to the firefly, which sat on his palm and blinked lazily at them. “Look at that.”

Hyunwoo shifted to get a better look, although his hand stayed splayed wide against Hyungwon’s back. “There’s a lot of them in this area, I think.”

They fell back into silence as they watched the firefly crawl carefully up Hyungwon’s fingers, until it perched at the very edge of his left index fingernail. It flickered its wings open, testing the air, and then took off in a buzz of motion.

Hyungwon let his hands fall to his lap. The firefly flitted away, until it was far enough that they could only track its motion through the occasional blips of light that it gave off. After a moment, a second one lit up roughly ten feet from them, near the parking lot. The lights dimmed and brightened and Hyunwoo slid his hand around to Hyungwon’s side so he could cup the jut of his hip in his palm.

Hyungwon was taller than him in this position, and he tipped his head down just enough to press his cheek against the crown of Hyunwoo’s head as he let out a breathy huff of air. “It’s dumb that I don’t really want to go back, right?”

Hyunwoo blinked, but couldn’t look over at him because Hyungwon’s head was still on top of his. “We don’t have to go anywhere, right now.”

Hyungwon was quiet for another long moment, and Hyunwoo just had to watch his fingers pull and twist together in his lap.

Then, “Let’s stay in Chicago for a few days.”

A car drove by and the headlights lit up the motel strip more than the half-burnt out lamps on the walls. “Yeah, ‘course. We’ll do that.”

 

Chicago was crowded and loud and it poured rain the second they got off the highway, but Jooheon still met them at the parking garage that he directed them to via text with a blinding grin and no issues with the weather, apparently.

“You made it!” He bounced from foot to foot until Hyungwon finally unfolded himself from the passenger seat, and then he was pulling him into a suffocating hug. “’Bout time, you jerk, I haven’t seen you in ages.”

“You’re the one that moved away right after graduation,” Hyungwon replied flatly, but still squeezed him back before releasing him. “I don’t think this is my fault.”

“Just ‘cuz you’re too lazy to get a car and visit me doesn’t mean you can turn this around on me,” Jooheon snickered, pushing a finger accusingly at the center of Hyungwon’s chest.

Hyungwon’s grin widened and he swatted Jooheon’s hand away as Hyunwoo popped open the trunk before getting out of his own seat. “Hey, I’m here now, so you gotta show me what a big shot like you has been up to.”

Hyunwoo lugged his and Hyungwon’s suitcases out of the trunk in one go before looking up to find Jooheon vibrating in place and grinning at him like a maniac.

“Hi,” Jooheon said, pushing a hand out in front of him with all the enthusiasm of someone meeting a celebrity. “Jooheon. It’s cool to finally meet you, dude!”

Hyunwoo shook his hand, although Jooheon tried to do some kind of back-slap thing at the last second and ended up colliding shoulders lightly. “Um, nice to meet you too. I’m Hyunwoo.”

“I know, dude, obviously.” Jooheon winced when Hyungwon elbowed him in the arm – Hyunwoo sympathized, Hyungwon’s elbows were practically lethal weapons. “Welcome to Chicago, anyways. It’s gonna be awesome.”

Jooheon was a good kid, Hyunwoo knew almost instantly as he led them out of the parking garage and down the sidewalk. He had a huge, black sweatshirt on and a snapback that he pulled down lower once they got outside to keep the rain off his face, but the way his eyes curved up and his cheeks rounded around his smiles was cute.

Hyungwon was obviously horribly charmed by him as well, for as much as Hyungwon could ever be charmed by someone. He let Jooheon chatter excitedly the whole time they walked, grin tugging at the edges of his mouth.

Hyunwoo held the one umbrella that they had thought to bring and Hyungwon bumped against his side to get under the cover, and the three of them took up way too much space on the sidewalk as they neared Jooheon’s apartment.

“It’s way cleaner than normal, I made it all pretty for you guys,” Jooheon enthused as he unlocked his front door. “My roommate won’t be back ‘till late, though, he has weird shifts this week.”

“That’s fine,” Hyungwon replied as they both kicked their shoes off in the entryway. “Is he going with us tonight, still?”

“Oh, shit, yeah. I can tell him to meet us there.” Jooheon already had his phone out and was texting someone by the time Hyunwoo finally stumbled out of his last sneaker and into the connecting room. “The acts officially start at 10 but Kihyun’s band doesn’t go on until closer to midnight usually, so he should be able to make it.”

Hyunwoo, like he usually did around Hyungwon and his friends, felt suddenly out of the loop. “Band?” he muttered to Hyungwon, who blinked sleepy eyes at him.

“Oh, right.” Hyungwon flattened his lips around a barely-there frown and propped a hand on his hip. “Kihyun’s just your friend, right Jooheon? Or does he work at the label too?”

“No way, oh my god, he would murder us all.” Jooheon had his head almost entirely in his fridge as Hyunwoo absently followed Hyungwon into the kitchen area. “He has a boring job, the band’s just his side gig. I only know him ‘cuz he and Changkyun went to school together, sort of. It’s kind of complicated.”

“Changkyun is Jooheon’s roommate,” Hyungwon filled in, and leaned against the counter as Jooheon rummaged through what looked like several six-packs worth of cheap beer and not much else. “We were gonna go see this band at a bar that they like tonight, if that’s cool.”

Hyunwoo shrugged and pushed his hands into his pockets out of complete lack of anywhere else good to put them. “That sounds good to me.”

“Sorry about the set up,” Jooheon said later as he flopped a deflated air mattress on the space they had cleared in the living room and set to inflating it. “I figured one of you guys could take the couch, and the other one could use this?”

“It’s way cheaper than a hotel, anyways,” Hyungwon replied from his lazy curl at the edge of the couch, which was a beat-up brown leather thing that Hyungwon had immediately gravitated towards.

Hyunwoo nodded and sat down on the other end of the couch. “Yeah, thanks for letting us stay here.”

“It’s seriously nothing, the amount of times Hyungwon let me crash at his place in college is, like, insane. I figured I had to pay it back somehow.”

“And I just made you sleep on the couch,” Hyungwon said, mouth curling like a cat’s as he shoved his feet underneath Hyunwoo’s thighs. His toes were cold from the air conditioning and rain and Hyunwoo could feel the chill even through his jeans. He rested a hand on Hyungwon’s thin ankle without thinking about it. “This is the celebrity treatment.”

Jooheon grinned as he shook out a fitted sheet. “Only the best for you.” He tucked the sheet onto the corner closest to him and when he glanced up he seemed to take a second, eyes darting between the two of them before settling on Hyungwon. His grin widened, but he went back to making the bed, and Hyungwon wasted no time before digging the remote out between the couch cushions and flipping the television on.

They ordered pizza, because Hyunwoo had driven almost six hours that day and Hyungwon got cranky when they had to wait too long for food, and they ate it on the couch while watching some cooking show that Jooheon knew way too much about for a supposedly casual watcher.

Hyungwon got shoved to the middle of the couch at some point to make room for Jooheon, who squeezed onto the end despite the made bed lying on the ground right in front of their feet, and Hyunwoo ended up with Hyungwon’s knees digging into his side.

After they completely cleaned out the two large pizzas they had gotten, including the breadsticks that Jooheon added as an afterthought, Hyungwon finally extracted himself from the couch. “’M gonna go get ready,” he said, stretching high enough that Hyunwoo clearly heard his back crack. “When are we leaving?”

Jooheon twisted in his seat to pull his phone off the side table. “About an hour? If that’s cool.”

“That works.” Hyungwon grabbed the handle of his suitcase and disappeared with it into the hall bathroom, leaving Hyunwoo and Jooheon each sitting on the far end of the couch.

The cooking show blared in the background. Hyunwoo watched a little queasily as they replayed a clip of someone slicing their finger accidentally with a knife until Jooheon cleared his throat.

“So. You’re the guy who’s letting Hyungwon drag him around for a week.”

Hyunwoo blinked and looked over at Jooheon, who fixed him with a gaze that would seem serious if his mouth wasn’t ticking up in the corners. “Um, yeah. That’s me.”

Jooheon broke into a full smile finally and snorted out a laugh. “Geez, dude, that’s something. Does he have some serious blackmail on you or what?”

“What? No.” Hyunwoo shifted nervously. “I just, um. We’re friends, and it’s my break from school right now anyways. It’s been fun.”

Jooheon tipped his head to the side and scratched at his temples, where his hair was buzzed shorter than the rest of his scalp. “Right, yeah, friends.” His jaw set a bit, and he took a breath before continuing. “Do you know why he’s doing all this?”  
Hyunwoo blinked. “He said he’s just been bored at work, um. And all that.”

“Work. Yeah, our Hyungwon’s a real worker bee.” Jooheon slid a little lower on the couch and bent his knees up to his chest. “He talks about you a lot.”

That was… kind of weird to hear. “What does he say?”

“Dunno.” Jooheon was leaning against the arm rest so he faced Hyunwoo, and he looked away then, back at the television. “Normal stuff, I guess. It’s mostly that you’re always in the stories he told me about school, back before we graduated. I figured you guys were really close.”

“Um. I think we are?”

“Right.” Jooheon gave him that look again – one that would have looked piercing and a bit insulting in sharper features, but in his face just seemed vaguely questioning. “Anyways. It’s good to finally meet you.”

“Are you guys bonding out there?” Hyungwon poked his head out from behind the corner of the hallway. He was changed from his t-shirt that he’d been wearing earlier into a different one, thinner and looser-collared so it hung beneath his collarbones. Hyunwoo couldn’t see properly, but he was pretty sure that he was also in this one pair of black skinny jeans that he only wore when he actually felt like bothering with that particular night. “I don’t want to miss this emotional moment.”

“Oh yeah, it’s a regular Hallmark movie out here.” Jooheon tipped his head backwards over the armrest so he could look at Hyungwon without moving. “Are you actually ready so quickly? You’ve changed, dude.”

Hyungwon sniffed and Hyunwoo couldn’t help but snort at the insulted look that crossed his face. “It’s casual tonight, right?”

“Yeah, sure.” Jooheon squirmed around so he could sit upright and still face Hyungwon. Hyunwoo couldn’t get a good look at his face, but whatever was on it made Hyungwon bristle a little. “Y’got no one to impress, I guess.”

Hyungwon’s eyes thinned for a moment, but then it passed quickly. “Sure,” he said, and ducked back behind the wall.

The bar they went to was a little smoky for Hyunwoo’s taste, but otherwise it seemed nice. It was well-lit despite the dark interior, all dark-grain wood and posters of bands that he had never heard of before.

Jooheon led the way like a tour guide navigating through a crowded city. “This is the best booth in the place,” he said proudly, sweeping a hand widely to demonstrate which booth he was talking about. It was tucked into the corner of one side of the bar, a circle table with one bench wrapping around. “You’re close enough to the bar but you can see the stage still. I have a lot of practice with this place, trust me.”

Hyungwon shoved him a little but slid into the booth seat just the same, mouth twitching up. “Just go get us drinks, you brat, we’re all suitably impressed.”

Jooheon grinned widely, eyes almost closed into crescents with the force of the motion, and then it was like he was gone in a puff of smoke.

Hyunwoo joined Hyungwon at the booth, feeling a little awkward and over-large like he always did at these type of crowded places. “Is his roommate still coming?”

“Oh, Changkyun?” Hyungwon blinked and glanced behind Hyunwoo towards the bar, back to where Jooheon had gone. “I think so. He works late shifts, but he should be meeting us here.”

They listened to the band that was performing then, two women with guitars and raspy voices that filled the air like more smoke, and after a moment Jooheon was back.

He wasn’t alone, this time. “I found Kihyun!” he crowed, arm wrapped around another man’s shoulders and jostling him a little more than he should, considering he was holding a pitcher of beer in the other hand. “He tried to run backstage, but I caught him.”

Kihyun was a skinny guy with a sharp jaw and a thin mouth that twisted as he attempted to juggle the armful of empty glasses that he had apparently been designated. “I can’t hang out for too long,” he warned, but sat on Hyungwon’s other side anyways. “I do actually need to warm up at some point.”

Jooheon flopped down next to Hyunwoo. “Sorry that we’re cooler than the guys in your band, I know it’ll be hard to tear yourself away.”

Kihyun shot Jooheon a long-suffering look but then just shook his head and turned to the other two. “I’m Kihyun, by the way. Sorry about him.”

Hyungwon grinned, his lazy one that spread warm and slow and hit his eyes like late-day sun. Hyunwoo’s stomach twisted, a little, and he accepted the beer that Jooheon passed his way. “Nice to finally meet you, I feel like I’ve heard so much from Jooheon already.”

Kihyun shot Jooheon a look and might have tried to kick him under the table, if Jooheon’s wince was anything to go by. “You’re friends with him, so you know not to believe half the stuff he says, right?”

“I’m Hyunwoo,” Hyunwoo said over Jooheon’s protests when Kihyun turned to him next. “Nice to meet you.”

“Same to you.” Kihyun’s look turned appraising, just a bit, but then it was gone and he was letting Jooheon lead the conversation.

After some time Kihyun had to leave, of course, slipping through a door that Hyunwoo figured led to the backstage waiting area, but then his seat was quickly taken by Changkyun.

Changkyun turned out to be a kid with a huge grin and a tendency to lean in against Jooheon, who gravitated towards him almost the moment that he got to the bar.

Hyunwoo spent a second with furrowed eyebrows, feeling bad and awkward for wanting to jump to conclusions, until Hyungwon leaned against his side.

“They’re dating, if you’re wondering,” he says, voice rough in Hyunwoo’s ear. “Been about three months now, I think, so they’re kind of still in that honeymoon phase.”

Hyunwoo watched Jooheon tip his face towards Changkyun’s, who grinned even wider and said something back to him before jostling his side and slinging an arm around his shoulders comfortably. “Right, ok.”

Hyungwon gave him a look, which Hyunwoo was just trying to puzzle through when Jooheon directed his attention back to the two of them. “Changkyun doesn’t believe that I actually jumped off that roof in college, Hyungwon,” he said, eyes bright and amused.

Changkyun snorted and shoved against Jooheon, shaking them both. “I can completely picture it happening, I just don’t know if I believe that he got over his fear of heights enough to actually do it.”

Hyungwon settled more comfortably next to Hyunwoo, tapping on the glass of his beer with his fingertips as he made an elaborate thinking face. “Which roof are we talking about, exactly?”

Jooheon whined and Changkyun laughed harder, leaning against his shoulder. “You’re the worst, c’mon. The house that Jackson lived in, with the blue porch? We had, like, just gotten back from seeing my parents, you have to remember.”

Hyunwoo felt Hyungwon stiffen just a bit against his side, but he was already speaking before Hyunwoo could think about what that meant. “That wasn’t really the roof, that was like an overhang. You were barely ten feet off the ground.”

Changkyun snorted as Jooheon squirmed more and continued to complain. “I still can’t believe you two managed to date for longer than a month. College-Jooheon sounds awful.”

“Excuse you,” Jooheon said, slapping a hand against the woodgrain of the table even as Hyunwoo’s stomach tried to throw itself off a cliff at what was happening, suddenly. “I was the best underclassman. The roof thing was mostly Jackson’s fault, anyways, he’s a dick.”

Hyungwon had leaned away from Hyunwoo at some point, although he only noticed when his side was suddenly cold from the lack of contact. “You two just fed off of each other’s nonsense, don’t be in denial.”

The bar hadn’t been this chilled before, had it? Hyunwoo blinked and couldn’t take his eyes off of Hyungwon suddenly. The conversation faded in his ears, sounds loud but words indistinct, as if he was hearing it through a bubble.

Hyungwon looked very, very distant all of a sudden. His eyes were dark and his hair was darker and the slight burn he had gotten at the beach had faded just slightly until only the tips of his ears and the tops of his cheekbones still carried a pink tinge.

The world moved around Hyunwoo despite everything, and at some point Jooheon dragged Changkyun off, presumably to the bar. Hyungwon settled back against the back of the booth and traced the condensation on the tabletop, and finally Hyunwoo swallowed against the stop in his throat.

“Um. I didn’t know, uh, that you and Jooheon…” Then the catch was back, and he had to pause.

Hyungwon picked up on his meaning, anyways, and responded without looking up at him. “Dated?” He tipped his glass up to swallow the last inch of beer at the bottom of it, and Hyunwoo was more fucked than he thought because despite the heaviness in his stomach his eyes still caught on the line of Hyungwon’s throat.

Hyungwon made a face and clunked the empty cup back onto the table. “It was pretty dumb for both of us. Anyways, I don’t like to make a big deal of those kind of things.”

Hyunwoo paused on that thought. It was true, actually – he had never thought about it much, but he really never heard anything about Hyungwon dating ever since he had met him. He was popular enough, with boys and girls, but he had always seemed to prefer doing his own thing far above being tied to someone else.

That was part of why the thought of him dating Jooheon seriously enough to _meet his parents_ rung a strange bell in his brain, but the other part – “I didn’t know you liked guys.”

It was the wrong thing to say, he realized almost immediately, but it didn’t stop Hyungwon’s mouth from twisting angrily. “So what,” Hyungwon said, voice cracked and bitter and stabbing in Hyunwoo’s gut. “I didn’t know you’d have a problem with it.”

“I don’t,” Hyunwoo replied, probably too quickly and forcefully but he couldn’t _not_. “I’m not that kind of person, plus…” His voice caught before he could continue with ‘plus, that would be really hypocritical of me’, and then it was too late anyways because Hyungwon was talking.

“How am I supposed to know you’re not? It’s not like I’ve been completely hiding it, anyways. What did you think Gunhee was last year?”

Hyunwoo blinked. Gunhee had been a friend of Hyungwon’s that he’d only met a few times, but had featured prominently on Hyungwon’s Instagram for a few months before disappearing. He had seemed friendly enough, although Hyunwoo still vaguely blamed Hyungwon picking up smoking again on him. “You were dating?”

Hyungwon made a disbelieving noise. “Sometimes you can be the most unobservant person I know.”

That didn’t seem fair. “It’s not like I see you very much these days,” Hyunwoo responded before he could really think, but it was enough to make Hyungwon finally look up at him, apparently. “You’ve been kind of busy, lately.”

Hyungwon blinked at him, lips about as thin as they ever got, and although he seemed like he wanted to say something in the end he just huffed out a sigh and ducked his head again. His ears were red, just a little, more than they already were from the sunburn.

The band onstage wrapped up a tangled mix of rock and folk music and suddenly Jooheon and Changkyun were back, loud and bright and enough to make Hyunwoo distracted, a little, from the sudden quiet of Hyungwon’s form.

It took most of the night for Hyunwoo to feel less like he had totally fucked up whatever he and Hyungwon had between them. Jooheon, excitable and friendly as anything, kept everyone on a steady path towards drunk that nobody seemed willing to fight, and by the time Kihyun’s band was finally getting on stage Hyungwon had inched just close enough to Hyunwoo again that he could feel his heat on his side.

Kihyun said a few greetings in the mic that Jooheon and Changkyun responded to with loud whoops of encouragement, and Hyungwon cracked into a reluctant smile. “They’re gonna get us kicked out,” he said, as if to himself.

Hyunwoo didn’t say anything, just watched as Hyungwon played with the plastic straw that was most of what was left of the dark and stormy that Jooheon brought him. His fingers were long and a little crooked at the knuckles, and his profile was handsome as always, and Hyungwon liked boys. Hyungwon had dated boys, multiple times, apparently.

Hyunwoo wasn’t sure why that new knowledge made him feel something between terrified and terrifyingly optimistic. He didn’t like either part, really.

Kihyun’s band was halfway through a grungy, charcoal-colored song about lost love and feeling too young when Changkyun leaned his elbows onto the table, dislodging Jooheon a bit from where he had been trying to get as close as possible to his side. “Are all of our friends really this sappy romantic?” He asked, voice wry and amused. “How do we always end up with the emotional artist types?”

Jooheon laughed and wrapped himself closer to Changkyun, which Hyunwoo watched with a growing sense of endearment. “Takes one to know one, you dork.”

Changkyun snorted through a blush but didn’t turn away from the smacking kiss that Jooheon planted on his temple.

“I think you take what you get when you decide to only be friends with gay guys who didn’t do great in school,” Hyungwon chimed in snarkily, and raised his glass in a mock-toast.

Jooheon rolled his eyes and looked over at Hyunwoo. “That’s mean, Hyunwoo’s gonna be a teacher, isn’t he? He’s probably pretty smart.”

Hyungwon blinked and opened his mouth to say something, but Hyunwoo was feeling dumbly brave and had just enough warmth in his stomach from whisky and the smooth line of Hyungwon’s jaw to say, “I don’t know if being good at school makes you any less likely to be a sappy romantic about guys. A lot of the stuff I’ve had to read in my lit classes points the opposite way, actually.”

Jooheon and Changkyun let out matching cackles and launched into a discussion about some friend of theirs who wore fake, round-rimmed glasses and read boring poetry, and Hyungwon looked at Hyunwoo with the edge of something indistinct in his expression.

Towards the end of Kihyun’s band’s set Hyungwon shook his glass at Hyunwoo, the ice clinking against the sides of the cup. “You’ve been single a while, haven’t you?” he said, only slightly accusingly.

Hyunwoo blinked, feeling like he’d been thrown into a conversation already in-motion. “Um. I guess?”

Hyungwon leveled his look a bit more, propping his chin up on his palm so he could turn more fully towards Hyunwoo. “Like, I’ve never known you with a girlfriend. What’s wrong with you? You’re handsome enough, you work out.” He poked at Hyunwoo’s bicep through his shirt with his free hand. “What’d you do?”

“Uh.” Hyunwoo was still reeling a bit from the conversation, and from the sudden weight of Hyungwon’s undivided attention on him. “I don’t know? I just, um, never really met anyone that I liked that much.” That wasn’t entirely true, but it was too late and Hyunwoo was too much on the edge of drunk to think about it anymore.

Hyungwon seemed to disagree, because he set his jaw combatively. “You’re being weird.”

“I’m being weird?” Hyunwoo felt a little offended, but mostly just confused. “You’ve been in a bad mood for, like, this entire trip so far. What’ve I done?”

Hyungwon rolled his eyes and took a short pull from his drink. “I have my reasons. What do you have to be so angsty about, Mr. Grad School?”

“Grad school’s hard, you know that, right?”

“Sure, but at least you’re doing something you like.” Hyungwon looked a little like he regretted saying that, but barreled through anyways. “Do you know how boring it is, working in finance?”

“Why’d you do it, then?”

Hyungwon retreated, if not physically then emotionally, somehow, and his expression went tight. “Whatever. It’s dumb, anyways. What’s done is done.”

Hyunwoo felt that bravery from before in his stomach again, the heat of it licking up to his lungs and then to his throat as he said, “I haven’t dated in ages because I haven’t met any guys I liked enough to try for, ok?”

The drummer in Kihyun’s band broke into a frantic solo that sounded like breaking bones and Hyungwon’s face was cast suddenly in red-tinted light from the stage. His expression barely moved, but there was something in his jaw that loosened. Their conversation had become private and hushed, somewhere along the way of it all, and so Jooheon and Changkyun hadn’t seemed to notice what was going on at the other end of the booth.

Hyungwon’s throat bobbed when he swallowed, and he leaned imperceptivity closer to Hyunwoo. “You like guys?”

Hearing it said out loud like that by a person he’d known for years but in a room full of strangers felt – odd, and uneasy, but also like breathing life into the concept anew. “Yeah, um. I do.”

Hyungwon shifted, propping an elbow on top of the booth’s bench and gripping his cup with the other hand tightly. He looked surprised, but there was something else in his posture that made Hyunwoo want to answer it, somehow. “Oh.” His voice was slow and carefully light, and he looked back to the stage as he sipped from his drink one more time. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Hyunwoo said, a little insulted still.

Hyungwon shrugged and cast another look over at him. This one was darker, just by a bit, and he kept the rim of his glass pressed to his lower lip as he replied, “I just always pictured you with a wife and a dog, white picket fence, all that stuff.”

“Oh.” Hyunwoo thought about that, and Hyungwon watched him think. “I mean, I dunno. I still like dogs.”

That made Hyungwon snort inelegantly, for some reason, and he shook his head as he looked back over at the stage. “’Course you do.”

The night passed quickly after that, a blur of more drinks and Jooheon crowing loudly once Kihyun emerged from backstage after his set. Hyunwoo couldn’t help but gravitate to Hyungwon’s side, being the only person he really knew at the bar, but finally Hyungwon didn’t seem to mind anymore.

At one point, while they paid their tab and coached Changkyun through calling an Uber, Hyungwon gripped the cuff of Hyunwoo’s shirt between two fingers pinched into the fabric. “Sorry,” he said, voice clear but eyes just a little thick from alcohol and the late hour. “I was kind of a dick, earlier, about all the gay stuff.”

Hyunwoo had known Hyungwon long enough to know that that was about as sincere of an apology as the other guy ever gave, and so it was a little impressive to get one so quickly. “It’s fine,” he replied, pinned under the heavy weight of Hyungwon’s lidded stare. “I know what you meant.”

Hyungwon bit his lower lip as if in thought and Hyunwoo couldn’t help but look at his mouth for just a bare second before flicking back up to his eyes. “Right.” Hyungwon released his sleeve, but stayed hovering close. “Ok. We’re good, then?”

“Yeah. We’re good.”

 

Hyunwoo woke up the next morning with just a slight hangover and an ache in his back from sleeping on the couch all night. Hyungwon had gotten back to Jooheon’s apartment and promptly claimed the air mattress, and he had been curled up and dead asleep by the time Hyunwoo had gotten out of the bathroom.

The morning was full of Jooheon loudly trying to make breakfast before Hyunwoo had to carefully take over a near-burned pan of eggs from him. Hyungwon curled around a mug of coffee, drinking only about a quarter of it, and watched the two of them with something fond in his eyes.

“You let him near the stove?” Changkyun called from the bathroom at one point when Hyunwoo was actually concerned that they would set the smoke alarm off. “First mistake of the day, dude.”

Hyungwon snorted from his position at the kitchen table and Jooheon shot him an offended look. “I’m just glad you finally found someone who’ll give you such constructive criticism,” he said when Jooheon pouted at him, and then curled further in towards his mug.

Hyunwoo watched the way that Hyungwon’s eyes looked sleepily towards them, and noticed how the back of his hair was standing straight up, and then turned back to the stove.

The day was clearer than the past one, with just a light mist in the morning that eventually broke into thin sun and the occasional cloud. Jooheon took the job of showing them around the city with pride, and they ended up wandering more than actually doing anything tourist-y.

Hyungwon seemed fine with that, though. He had bothered Hyunwoo into lending him one of his jackets, because Hyungwon had apparently just dumped a bunch of stuff into his suitcase without any planning, and when the warmest it got that day was still brisk and windy he had declared he needed more layers.

“How did you and Changkyun meet?” Hyunwoo asked at one point in the afternoon, after they had stopped for lunch. Changkyun hadn’t actually gone out with them – he’d apologized over and over again for having to work on the weekend until Jooheon had all but pushed him out of the apartment door.

The remaining three of them were wandering down a street in some shopping district, with Hyungwon trailing behind as he peered into the windows of the stores they walked by.

Jooheon laughed a little and shoved his hands in the deep pockets of the sweatshirt he had on. “It’s not really an interesting story,” he started, kicking at the sidewalk as they walked. “He was friends with one of the producers we work with, and we both started doing some freelancing stuff at the studio at the same time, basically.”

Hyunwoo nodded like he knew anything about how music production worked.

“We just kind of clicked, I don’t know.” Jooheon shot him a sideways grin, which would have looked casual if his ears weren’t turning pink through an embarrassed flush. “Bros at first sight, you know? And then, I guess, we just started dating at some point.”

“You guess?”

“Yeah, I mean, you know how it is.” Jooheon puffed his cheeks out in thought and adjusted the beanie he had pulled on over his hair with a hand. “You’re just friends, but then you kind of realize that you get along better with them than anyone else, right? And from there everything kind of makes sense.”

Hyunwoo thought about that for the rest of the afternoon, in between letting Hyungwon bully him into taking pictures at every mural that they walked by and Jooheon insisting that they try this one specific ice cream place that ended up being another thirty-minute walk out of their way.

Hyungwon, although he probably didn’t realize it, had kind of hit a surprisingly sore note with his questions the past night. Sure, Hyunwoo had never really, actually dated anyone – at least, he didn’t think the one girl in fifth grade counted. Plus, she had pushed him down the slide when he had forgotten that it was their 100th day, but he hadn’t actually realized that they were ‘dating’ at that point.

Hyunwoo tapped the camera button on Hyungwon’s phone clumsily a few more times, watching through the screen as Hyungwon tipped his head down, away from the camera, looking for all the world like a careless street model and not at all like a guy barely out of college who still sometimes couldn’t get himself out of bed without an intervention.

Hyunwoo blinked some unnamed feeling away as he fiddled with Hyungwon’s phone until Hyungwon demanded to see the pictures and handed it over. The longer that this trip went on the more unsettled he felt, the more he found himself having to rethink things that he had thought were just obvious, obvious facts.

Hyungwon was handsome – obviously. That was just a fact in the universe, existing outside of space and time and Hyunwoo himself. Hyungwon was handsome just like water was wet. It wasn’t a groundbreaking idea.

Hyungwon also, somehow, inexplicably, got along with Hyunwoo. Or, at least, he seemed to. Hyungwon was prickly and hard to get to known on a good day, but somewhere along the way of being friends with him Hyunwoo became one of the people that got Hyungwon’s rare, full-faced grins directed at him. Hyungwon liked him, he was pretty sure, at least to some degree.

But then there was the latest thing, the most recent stick that had been jammed in the bike spokes that made up Hyunwoo’s previously smooth-sailing life. Hyungwon liked guys – had _dated_ guys, _multiple_ ones, and Hyunwoo was just figuring this out. He couldn’t get the thought of it quite out of his mind – college-age Hyungwon making Jooheon flush by leaning in too close, Hyungwon in his work clothes smoking outside a bar with Gunhee, who he still only really knew from blurry, aesthetically-darkened pictures online.

The issue, Hyunwoo found his brain whispering in the back of his mind as they climbed the stairwell back up to Jooheon’s apartment later in the day, was that this new discovery was making some long-dormant parts of his relationship with Hyungwon suddenly, embarrassingly relevant again.

Hyunwoo had a bad habit of liking things that were pretty, but sharp. Thorny roses, ice sculptures that make your fingers stick frozen to the surface if you try to touch them, cats that stretched in the sun but lashed out with claws when you approached – Hyungwon had always seemed to fit into that category easily.

But. Sometimes, when he was sun-warm and sprawled on a beach or curled up in blankets on a couch watching TV, Hyungwon was almost too-easily approached. He curved towards Hyunwoo at moments like those like a plant seeking the sun, the polar opposite of a prickly rosebush. Hyunwoo could only assume it was a comfort-seeking thing, born of being with someone you were friends with, someone you trusted.

Nothing else. Because, because – Hyunwoo wasn’t Jooheon, obviously-adoring and bright and energetic and artistic, or Gunhee, who had the same edge of mystery that Hyungwon liked to try to cultivate sometimes. Hyunwoo was just a guy who went to the gym enough to be in shape and wanted to teach elementary school someday.

Anyways. He wasn’t the kind of guy to let himself get down in this kind of thing. He had lasted the past few years without stewing in this line of thought, and he aimed to continue on that streak.

“We should totally go do karaoke tonight.”

“You sound like you _want_ this night to end with you dead by my hands.”

“No, dude, it sounds like fun, right Hyunwoo?”

“Um. Right.”

 

They started at a karaoke bar, and somewhere along the way picked up Changkyun and Kihyun, who both looked to be at complete opposite ends of a spectrum titled ‘Amount of Excitement About the Concept of Karaoke’.

“You’re, like, a professional singer, you should love this,” Jooheon half-shouted at Kihyun over the din of Changkyun belting out early Taylor Swift. “This is, like, your _shit_ , dude.”

Kihyun leveled stare so dry it should have come with a complementary desert tumbleweed at Jooheon. “I think that was an insult. I’m not sure how, but I think it was.”

Hyungwon snorted on the other side of Hyunwoo, where he had collapsed almost the second they got into their private room. “It absolutely was. Jooheon, you should break out the Nicki Minaj next.”

Jooheon’s eyes lit up like Christmas lights and Hyungwon let out another peal of laughter when the other guy immediately started paging through the song book. He muffled the snorts in the collar of Hyunwoo’s jacket, which he had taken off just to change into a thin band t-shirt before putting it right back on.

“You like to encourage him, huh,” Hyunwoo observed, half-into the neck of his beer bottle as he watched the rainbow lights of the disco ball installed in the ceiling flash against Hyungwon’s face.

“Can you blame me?” Hyungwon curled around his own drink, folded up onto the couch. “It’s free entertainment, basically. Who needs TV when you have Jooheon?”

Hyunwoo shook his head on a laugh but didn’t manage to look away from Hyungwon, and when Hyungwon looked up at him they were, a little, closer than he had thought.

There was the briefest moment where something went off in the air between them, tinged like the air before a thunderstorm, but then it was gone and Hyungwon was clambering off of the couch to hang over Jooheon and bother him as he tried to push the buttons on the karaoke machine. It left Hyunwoo sitting there, beer sweating in his hand, and a feeling like he had missed a step on a staircase.

The karaoke lasted long enough for Hyungwon and Kihyun to get into a kind of bitchy stalemate with the other three, although Hyunwoo insisted that he had no place in the argument at all. Either way, they wrapped up the hour that they had rented the room and then wandered down the street to a bar that Kihyun recommended this time.

It was noticeably quieter and calmer than anywhere they had been in Chicago yet, and Hyunwoo added another tally to Kihyun’s ‘probably a sane person’ count as they all piled into a booth. This bar looked like it would smell like cedar wood if it didn’t smell like beer and smoke, and they had a soccer game on the TV near the bar.

Hyungwon pressed up to Hyunwoo’s side and shot him a glance. “Of course you and Kihyun have the same taste in places,” he said, leaning across Hyunwoo to grab a napkin from his other side. “You’re both grandpas trapped in the bodies of twenty-somethings.”

Hyunwoo was stupidly aware of the heat of Hyungwon at his side. “What’s wrong with this place?”

Hyungwon’s look turned sardonic and teasingly-pitying, and he patted Hyunwoo’s thigh under the table. “Nothing, handsome, don’t worry your head about it.” He leaned further into Hyunwoo’s side in the way that Hyunwoo knew meant he didn’t mean the cavalier harshness of his words.

The imprint of his hand stayed warm through Hyunwoo’s jeans even when he removed it to pick at the fries that Jooheon ordered.

Later that night, after catching a cab back to Jooheon’s apartment and waving him and Changkyun off to go to bed, Hyungwon leaned against the kitchen counter and watched Hyunwoo stir a small pot of ramen.

Hyungwon was wearing a pair of black jeans that Hyunwoo was really familiar with, although that familiarity never seemed to stop him from getting distracted by how thin and long they made his legs seem. He blamed that absent-minded focus on why he didn’t clue in immediately when Hyungwon shifted his weight and spoke up. “Have you really not dated anybody the entire time I’ve known you?”

Hyunwoo blinked up from Hyungwon’s calves to his face, and then to the pot of noodles. “Yeah, um. It’s been awhile.” More like ‘never’, but he didn’t like to make a habit of making himself more stupidly vulnerable to Hyungwon.

“That’s so weird.”

“Thanks.”

“No, like.” Hyungwon’s jaw set stubborn and familiar and he knocked a fist against the laminate of the counter. “I don’t know. You’re, like, the nicest guy, and you’re super buff, and all that.”

That made Hyunwoo’s stomach warm, because he was an idiot. “Thanks?” He said again. His vocabulary made a habit of totally leaving him sometimes when Hyungwon decided to focus all of his attention on him like this.

Hyungwon fell silent again, and Hyunwoo managed to focus on the ramen again for a few more minutes.

Then, “Have you ever even kissed a guy?”

Hyunwoo dropped the wooden spoon he was using to stir the pot and it flicked boiling water up onto his wrist. “Ow, fuck,” he swore under his breath, just remembering at the last second that it was almost three in the morning and people were probably sleeping.

Hyungwon watched but made no move to help as Hyunwoo quickly dried his wrist on a discarded kitchen towel, and waited for him to pick the spoon up again before repeating himself. “You said you hadn’t dated in ages, so. Have you?”

Hyunwoo tore open the flavor packet so he wouldn’t have to look at Hyungwon’s face when he responded. “I mean. Not really, no.”

“Not really?” Hyungwon’s voice had gained a kind of eager edge that it got whenever he had finally stumbled upon something in a conversation that actually interested him. It made Hyunwoo nervous, even more so, to have that directed towards him. “And you’re sure you like guys?”

Hyunwoo had to look over at him at that. Hyungwon had put just the thinnest line of eyeliner on before leaving for karaoke that night, and most of it was smudged at the corners of his eyes and underneath his lower lashes now. His collarbones seemed even more jutted-out and angular under the harsh fluorescents of Jooheon’s kitchen, and his lips were red from biting at them the way he always did.

“Yeah. Pretty sure.”

Hyungwon peered at him with a kind of single-minded focus that Hyunwoo was used to seeing directed at cute babies and his phone screen.

Then, Hyungwon seemed to come to a decision, and he squared his shoulders about as much as someone as skinny as him could. “Do you want to try anyways?”

The water in the pot hissed with steam, and the apartment AC kicked itself on again with a whirr.

Hyunwoo must have said something, or made some noise of assent, because the next thing he knew Hyungwon had leaned over and pressed their mouths together. He wouldn’t be able to tell anybody what he had said, though – everything that he had in his brain was quickly replaced by the feeling of Hyungwon’s mouth on his, and the way that one of his hands twitched carefully to Hyunwoo’s shoulder.

The kiss lasted a bare second but obviously long enough to completely wipe Hyunwoo’s mind of any sense, because when Hyungwon pulled away Hyunwoo responded by gripping his hip carefully and pulling him back in.

Hyungwon made a soft, surprised noise in the back of his throat, more gentle than any sound Hyunwoo had ever heard him make before. He responded quickly to the kiss, though, and his bare arms were chilled in the air conditioning of the apartment when they pressed to the side of Hyunwoo’s neck, slung over his shoulders.

Hyunwoo was basically sober at this point, and he was so grateful for that fact because it felt like he needed that level of care in order to avoid breaking the moment like it was glass. He wasn’t a smart enough guy to stop himself from curving his hands around Hyungwon’s hips, pressing against the bones of them with his thumb, but it was a careful thing.

It was strange, Hyunwoo thought as Hyungwon seemed to shiver against him and the kiss turned just slightly wetter, how familiar Hyungwon’s form was. He flexed his fingers against Hyungwon’s hips and felt them twitch, a little, just a bit closer.

He had touched Hyungwon to a degree before, sometimes often, depending on the mood that the other guy was in. None of it had ever had that reaction, though, and the thrill of it went right to Hyunwoo’s head.

After a moment Hyungwon pulled away again, slowly, and Hyunwoo let him this time. He blinked at him with eyes suddenly unused to the brightness of the kitchen, but Hyungwon looked similarly struck.

He didn’t move away any further, just brushed a knuckle lightly through the short hair at the nape of Hyunwoo’s neck with a searching look. “You definitely like boys, then?” Hyungwon said finally, voice thick. His lips were redder than ever and just the beginning of swollen, and Hyunwoo had to concentrate to not lean in and bite at them gently.

His brain finally decided to come crawling back in through his ears and Hyunwoo pulled his hands away, slow enough to not startle the stillness of the moment. Hyungwon did the same, and hooked his thumbs into his pockets like he didn’t know what else to do with them.

“Yeah,” Hyunwoo finally said, and his voice was a strange rasp that he hadn’t heard it sound like before. “Yeah, um. I do.”

Hyungwon blinked slowly at him, then dropped his gaze to look down at the ramen, which was surely over-boiled and awful by now. His lashes were dark smudges against the paleness of his cheeks, and Hyunwoo itched to brush at them with the pad of his thumb.

This was… not great.

 

They didn’t really talk about it the next morning. Hyunwoo took the couch again, even though Hyungwon made a few motions towards giving him the air mattress that night.

He woke up the next morning after everyone else, as evidenced by the din of noise coming from the kitchen, which really wasn’t separated from the living room by much more than half a wall. Hyunwoo felt a little like a computer coming out of reboot, with the memory of Hyungwon pressed to his front and his mouth against his coming back in bits and pieces.

He sat up groggily and swiped a palm across his eyes before slowly getting up and off the couch.

“Hey!” Changkyun greeted him brightly from where he was leaning against the fridge. Jooheon and Hyungwon were both sitting at the kitchen table, and they turned simultaneously to look at Hyunwoo as he padded in.

Hyunwoo watched Hyungwon’s face, looking for anything that might say what he was feeling about what happened the last night, but all he got was a look up and down and then a sleepy raised eyebrow. “You really need to trash those sweats,” Hyungwon said, almost entirely into his cup of coffee. “There’s like a billion holes in those.”

And from there everything was weirdly normal. They sat around the apartment nursing various stages of hangovers for a few hours, the TV turned on to a sports channel dimly in the background.

Hyungwon let Hyunwoo sit next to him at the table without moving further away (or closer). Instead he just stretched, spine cracking, and made idle commentary over the soundtrack of Jooheon and Changkyun bickering about whether to make breakfast or lunch.

They didn’t do much that day. Hyunwoo didn’t mind, honestly a little tired of all of the wandering they had done the past day or so, and Hyungwon seemed in no mood to want to move once they all gravitated towards Jooheon’s couch.

There was an awkward moment when they were all getting settled in where Hyunwoo was almost, almost sure that he had Officially fucked everything up with Hyungwon the past night, but then Hyungwon huffed and pushed his feet into Hyunwoo’s lap like always. It was weirdly comforting, and Hyunwoo let his hand rest on Hyungwon’s ankles. Like always.

He wasn’t stupid enough to not notice the glance that Jooheon gave them, and then the sideways look he exchanged with Changkyun, but whatever. It was his own business if he wanted to be a fucking idiot who was in love with his best friend, wasn’t it?

The TV changed to a commercial for dish soap and Hyunwoo’s brain caught up to itself in fits and starts.

Of course he was in love with Hyungwon. Obviously. How much more of an idiot could he be with all this?

Hyungwon’s skin seemed thin as paper where it stretched across the joint of his ankle, and Hyunwoo found himself tracing that bump like a nervous tic.

The day rolled onwards, lazy and quiet and slow. Hyungwon gradually rearranged himself across the couch until Jooheon and Changkyun were finally making noises about getting dinner and Hyunwoo realized that Hyungwon was leaning against his side, face half-smushed against his bicep as they watched the bad horror movie Changkyun had found.

They ordered Thai takeout and ate it while watching more movies. Hyungwon shifted again, eventually finding a spot on the floor so he could lean up against the couch just to the side of Hyunwoo’s knees.

Hyunwoo just looked down at the dark whorl of Hyungwon’s hair at the top of his head and thought, idly, of how it would be to kiss him again.

 

They packed up to head out after being in Chicago for a few days. Jooheon pulled Hyunwoo into a hug right after he finished with Hyungwon, and it was surprisingly nice.

“You gotta get Hyungwon’s skinny butt up here more often,” Jooheon said as he released Hyunwoo. “It was nice to meet you, dude.”

“Right, yeah, same to you,” Hyunwoo replied. Jooheon nodded, seeming pleased with himself, and slung an arm around Changkyun’s shoulders as they watched Hyunwoo heave the second suitcase into the trunk of his car.

“Where are you guys going now, anyways? Back home?”

Hyungwon shot Hyunwoo a look from over on the other side of the car. “I guess,” he said, although his mouth was twisting the way it did when he ate something he didn’t like, or said something he didn’t mean. “What do you think?”

It was morning, and a cool breeze sent goosebumps up the back of Hyunwoo’s spine as he thought about the way that Hyungwon’s lips pressed together and made them pale, blood pushed out.

It was morning, and the thought of making the drive all the way back to Hyungwon’s apartment to drop him off and then, presumably, go back to seeing him maybe a few times a month, made Hyunwoo’s stomach go sour.

“Maybe.” He fiddled with the car keys in his hand so he didn’t have to try to diagnose the way that Hyungwon’s expression changed imperceptibly with everything he said. “I have a few more days until classes start back up again.”

When he looked back up Hyungwon was peering at him still, and there was that expression again. Searching and curious and a little, sharply, interested.

“We don’t have to go anywhere else, you know,” Hyungwon said as they sat at a red light on the way out of the city.

Hyunwoo shifted in his seat and tapped the steering wheel. “I mean. I don’t have anything else going on that I have to rush back to.”

“I just.” Hyungwon slouched down a bit, tipping his head to the side to look at Hyunwoo. Hyunwoo carefully didn’t look over at him. “I feel like I’ve kind of stolen you.”

Hyungwon didn’t sound like he felt bad about it, necessarily – he tended to never sound like that. When Hyungwon regretted something it showed up in other, smaller ways: the careful way he changed his posture and bent, apologetically, closer, the way he’d present small things to people like a cat bringing home a dead mouse and thinking you’d be pleased with it.

Now he just sounded a little thoughtful. Almost wistful, although Hyunwoo had no idea why he’d be sounding like that.

“I don’t feel like you’ve stolen me.” Hyunwoo chanced a look over at him and Hyungwon was blinking blearily back. “I’m the one driving, after all. I could have just turned around at any point.”

“Or just abandoned me on the side of the road somewhere.” Hyungwon responded, his mouth tilting up at the corner just a bit.

Hyunwoo laughed shortly and took a careful right turn. “I would never do that.”

Hyungwon shook his head and clicked the radio on to some acoustic station, turned to just a low thrum behind their conversation as they eventually decided to make their way back in the direction of home.

“There’s always D.C,” Hyungwon said at one point, messing with his phone while Hyunwoo drove down the highway. “There’s stuff there.”

“Just stuff.”

“Yeah, you know, museums and shit. You like museums, right?” Hyunwoo couldn’t help but snort and Hyungwon looked insulted. “I’m not saying that just ‘cuz you’re all academic now, it just seems like the kind of thing you would like.”

“I mean, I guess I like museums. I can’t really picture you going to one out of your own free will, though.”

Hyungwon sniffed. “Art museums are fine, I like those. It’s the history ones that get a little dry.”

“D.C. has art. It’s not just dead presidents everywhere.”

“If D.C. actually had dead presidents just wandering the premises I think I would be much more interested in visiting, actually.” Hyungwon typed something into his phone. “GPS says about ten hours. We can stop somewhere halfway?”

Hyunwoo shrugged. “Whatever you want.”

What Hyungwon wanted ended up being them driving for a solid six hours, stopping briefly at gas stations to grab soda and fill the tank back up, and then going for another while until Hyungwon’s Google Maps chimed up to welcome them to Pennsylvania.

The cheery voice seemed to startle Hyungwon from where he had been watching the farm fields go by for the past hour or so, and he stretched about as well as he could. “Let’s stop for the night.”

Hyunwoo glanced over and then back to the road. “Sounds good.”

The motel they picked this time was a bit bigger, with a sketchy-looking pool at the side of the stretch of rooms. Hyungwon claimed the bed closest to the bathroom again, and disappeared to the shower while Hyunwoo shuffled through the food delivery flyers that were left on the table by the TV.

The room was too-chilled by the air conditioning, which was turned up too high for it still being early April. Hyunwoo ended up grabbing the closest flyer and his phone before slipping out of the room to sit on the curb outside, half to escape the chill and half to avoid being in the room when Hyungwon got out of the shower.

He was kind of emotionally dense, but even he knew that that was a situation he didn’t need to put his heart through right now.

He ordered pizza from the flyer that he’d taken out of the room with him, and by the time he had hung up and was idly texting an increasingly concerned Hoseok the door behind him was opening with a creak.

“Hey.” Hyunwoo twisted to look up at Hyungwon. He stood above him, hair wet and dripping into his eyes and hands shoved into the pockets of a pair of track pants that he had taken to wearing to sleep lately. “Whatcha doing out here?”

“’S cold in there,” Hyunwoo replied, watching Hyungwon settle onto the curb next to him with all the grace of a falling pile of sticks. “I just ordered us pizza, if that’s cool.”

Hyungwon hummed agreeably and folded his arms over his knees. He had pushed his hair off of his face to dry, and the sight of his bare forehead sent something fond through Hyunwoo’s lungs. They sat in silence.

The sky had quickly darkened after they pulled into the motel parking lot, and was now a dusty blue. Cars rolled by on the main road and cast golden headlights onto them briefly, before they were gone.

A firefly flickered out from behind one of the parked cars.

They watched it make its way on a winding path in front of them before flying up, and when Hyungwon tipped his head back to watch it Hyunwoo’s eyes stayed stuck on the bend of his throat.

Hyungwon swallowed, and Hyunwoo copied the motion without thinking. “You know you’re, like, my best friend, right?”

Hyungwon’s voice sounded softer than usual, and Hyunwoo was instinctively worried. “What?”

Hyungwon bent forward over his crossed arms and kneecaps and buried the lower half of his face in his elbows. “You heard me.” It was muffled, but Hyunwoo did.

“Um.” Hyunwoo just wiped his palms on the thighs of his jeans. They were suddenly clammy, even though the night air was rapidly cooling around them. “I just, uh. Thanks?”

Hyungwon huffed and turned enough that he could look at Hyunwoo without actually lifting his head up from his arms. His back bent like a bow, curved and taut with tension. Hyunwoo wanted to press a hand to his lower back and feel the pull of the muscles there, rub the stress away just a bit.

He wanted to kiss Hyungwon again, even now in the secondhand-smoky parking lot of a cheap motel.

Something must have gone strange in his expression because Hyungwon’s eyebrows quirked down and he sat up a bit. “Feel free to return the sentiment.”

Hyunwoo started. “Oh, right. Um. I mean, you’re my best friend too?”

“You sound really sure about that.”

“I mean, I dunno. We don’t see each other that much these days.”

Hyungwon straightened entirely and leaned back on his hands now. “So? We’re seeing each other now.”

Hyunwoo nodded carefully and didn’t bring up the fact that Hyungwon had been strangely, tensely on edge practically the entire trip. “Right.”

Hyungwon looked like he wanted to add something else, but in the end he just pushed his hair back from his forehead again and pulled himself up off the curb. “Whatever. I’ll be inside.”

“Hey, wait, don’t do that.” Hyunwoo stood up too and followed Hyungwon, standing at his side while he worked the door open to their room.

“Don’t do what?”

“Go all weird like that.”

“Weird like what?” Hyungwon finally got the door open and stomped inside, although the effect was muted by the fact that he hadn’t ever actually put shoes back on. “I’m being normal.”

“No, you – you do this thing, you know, where you like to pretend that you’re not upset, but you are.” Hyunwoo closed the door behind him, and Hyungwon rounded on him as the latch clicked shut.

“I’m not upset.” He stood like he was about to run, like he’d take off at any second. “Maybe you’re just getting on my nerves, ok? We’ve been in a car for days by now, it’d be bound to happen.”

Hyunwoo noticed the redness at the top of Hyungwon’s cheekbones, and the way it spread to his ears. “Okay. Sorry.”

That seemed to just make Hyungwon more upset, somehow. “Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“Doing – doing that, being all nice.” He stepped closer, and Hyunwoo dumbly noticed how he smelled like soap. “You don’t even know what you’re apologizing for.”

“It’d help if you told me what I did? I guess?”

“Would it?” Hyungwon took another step closer, and Hyunwoo’s shoulder blades bumped against the closed door. “Why’d you let me kiss you the other night?”

“What?” Hyunwoo’s mind weakly flashed back to that moment, and he could almost feel the heat of Hyungwon against his front. Then, he actually could, because Hyungwon was pressing further into his space. “You asked me.”

Hyungwon puffed up further, like an angry cat. “And you just do everything I ask you to do? You just went along with the road trip, with all of this,” he gestured vaguely around the hotel room, “because I asked you too?”

The short answer was that yes, of course he did, because Hyunwoo was an idiot and was apparently stupidly in love with a guy who had the emotional sensitivity of a bull dozer. “What do you want me to say?”

Hyungwon’s eyes had gone bright and just a touch wet at some point in this conversation, and he was close enough now that Hyunwoo could see the separate curves of his eyelashes. He breathed in, then out in a slow puff of air, and then he was pushing forward to grip Hyunwoo by the shoulders and kiss him again.

It was almost entirely different this time. This time, Hyungwon wasted no time in pressing forward against Hyunwoo’s front. This time, Hyunwoo knew to respond immediately by pulling Hyungwon in by the hips just seconds after their mouths met.

Hyungwon curved in on him, almost collapsing against his front as he opened his mouth for Hyunwoo, who took the invitation as eagerly as he did anything regarding Hyungwon.

Where the first kiss had been strangely familiar, this one was almost startlingly new. Hyunwoo took the chance to bite at Hyungwon’s bottom lip and it made Hyungwon whine high and in the back of his throat.

The sound was like a punch to Hyunwoo’s gut, and before he knew it he had flipped their positions so that Hyungwon was pushed against the front door to the room.

Hyungwon’s shoulders knocked against the wood as they spun but he didn’t seem to mind, and instead turned single-mindedly to apparently trying to climb Hyunwoo. He made another broken noise and pressed his thumbs to Hyunwoo’s jawline as their legs slotted in between each other’s, and then he was scrabbling at the bottom of Hyunwoo’s t-shirt to press cool hands against the bare skin of his sides.

Hyunwoo could tell that thoughts were trying to form in the back of his mind but they were all sent scattering by the heat of Hyungwon’s mouth and the way that the thin fabric of his track pants meant that Hyunwoo could feel him beginning to get hard against his hip when he pushed even closer.

The thought of that, of Hyungwon reacting that strongly to _him_ , was staggering. Hyunwoo just had to grip Hyungwon’s hips tighter and push down to mouth at the side of his neck, especially once Hyungwon started making the kind of noises the seemed like he would like Hyunwoo to keep going, thanks.

“Fuck,” Hyungwon breathed out, the first full word since they had kissed again. He shivered against Hyunwoo and ground his hips just barely against Hyunwoo’s thigh that had ended up between Hyungwon’s legs, somehow. “You, _shit_ ,” as Hyunwoo let his teeth scrape against the dip between his neck and shoulder. “How are you good at this?”

Hyunwoo hummed against the mark that he had decided he was set on making against Hyungwon’s skin but didn’t respond further, just worried at the spot with his teeth before pressing a kiss to it and working his way back up.

Hyungwon seemed to finally get impatient and yanked him back up completely after a few seconds, pulling him in to kiss him again.

That was, of course, when someone on the other side of the door knocked loudly, startling Hyungwon and making him bang Hyunwoo in the chin with his shoulder.

“Oh shit, sorry, fuck, the pizza,” Hyungwon stammered, hands fluttering up to Hyunwoo’s chin before dropping back down to his sides. “Are you okay?”

Hyunwoo had managed to not bit through his tongue or anything, so that was a plus. “Yeah, um, I’m alright.”

They moved around each other awkwardly, with Hyungwon slipping past Hyunwoo and further into the hotel room as Hyunwoo grabbed his wallet off of the TV table and opened the door just enough to pay the delivery guy and take the pizza box before closing the door again.

When he turned back around Hyungwon had his back to him, both hands working to unzip his suitcase. His head was dipped down so the pale nape of his neck caught Hyunwoo’s eye, and when he stepped forward to drop the pizza box on the other bed he just had to carefully brush his fingertips against that patch of skin.

Hyungwon jumped, barely, and looked back at him. “What?” He asked, although his eyes dipped back down after only making contact with Hyunwoo’s for a moment.

Hyunwoo didn’t respond immediately, just watched the way that a red flush moved across Hyungwon’s face and down the back of his neck. The mark that Hyunwoo had left in the junction of his neck and shoulder was turning red, and when he thumbed it gently Hyungwon shivered under his hand.

Then, “We can eat.”

It felt like it should be strangely normal, eating pizza cross-legged on opposite beds with the TV turned on to sitcom reruns that neither of them were really watching. Hyungwon curled up against the headboard of his bed and only ate two pieces, eyes blankly on the show while Hyunwoo worked his way steadily through his half of the pizza.

The air was tense, though, with the unfinished ends of everything dangling in between them while they got ready for bed. Hyunwoo washed up and then sat on his bed to slowly type out a text to his mom when the mattress moved underneath him.

Hyungwon had pressed a knee into the mattress at the side of Hyunwoo and then stopped, looking at Hyunwoo with an unasked question in his eyes. His lips were still red, and the mark on his neck was almost laughably stark against his skin with the low drape of the collar of his shirt.

Hyunwoo had to have answered his question, somehow, because Hyungwon let out a shaky breath before swinging his other leg across his lap, settling against his thighs, and pushing in to kiss him again.

Hyungwon wasted almost no time before he got his hands underneath Hyunwoo’s shirt, this time, and he pulled back from the kiss after a moment to blink at him. “Is this good?” he asked, the words hanging from thin threads in the air between them.

The light of the motel room was yellow and made Hyungwon’s hair and lashes go just a bit golden-brown. “Yeah, um. It’s good.” Hyungwon’s jaw set and he nodded before tugging Hyunwoo’s shirt up and off, hands immediately returning to flutter against Hyunwoo’s stomach and sides.

The kiss went hot and wet and Hyungwon got squirmy, twitching under Hyunwoo’s hands as they curved around to the small of his back.

He let out a soft huff when Hyunwoo on a whim rolled his hips up, and the breath turned into moan when he did it again. Suddenly it was like they had never been interrupted before, against the door, and the room was ten degrees hotter.

There was something instinctual and obvious about it all, even as Hyunwoo was dizzy with the newness of this thing that was happening. Of course Hyungwon made that sound when Hyunwoo dared to move his hands down just a bit to squeeze his ass through his track pants, of course he got pushy and demanding when Hyunwoo backed off almost immediately after.

“Stop that, don’t be dumb,” Hyungwon scolded, the effect dampened by how desperately he was working his hips against Hyunwoo’s at this point. There was color high on his cheeks, and when he leaned back to grip Hyunwoo’s thighs for stability the bones of his hips stood out sharply. “C’mon.”

“I’m not being dumb,” Hyunwoo muttered, because he was easily baited by Hyungwon, and took the opportunity to kiss him quiet. It was easier than any other way of getting Hyungwon to shut up, he was learning, and it always got Hyungwon melting just a bit more against him.

“You’re, like, stupidly ripped,” Hyungwon said at one point, fingers pressing at Hyunwoo’s abs while Hyunwoo just stared at how close Hyungwon’s hands were to his waistband.

“Thanks?” Hyungwon shot him a look that was unamused but somehow still thickly fond, and then he was moving to push at Hyunwoo’s shorts.

The bed was definitely not big enough for them both, but Hyungwon didn’t seem to mind. Instead, he tugged Hyunwoo into place until he was sitting high against the headboard and Hyungwon could stretch down the bed, feet hanging off the edge but otherwise sturdy.

“Shit,” Hyunwoo felt rather than heard Hyungwon breath the word out against the skin of his stomach as he pulled Hyunwoo’s shorts down. He was hard, obviously, and his dick pressed against the front of his underwear demandingly. “You’re big.”

It shouldn’t have been as much of a turn-on as it was, but Hyunwoo still swallowed back a moan and clenched his hands in the comforter. Hyungwon nipped at the skin of his hips once, and then turned his attention more directly elsewhere.

Hyunwoo had thought that Hyungwon’s mouth was nice before, when it was swollen and bitten-red and dropped open around a whine, but it was something entirely different when Hyungwon first went to press a kiss against the head of his dick.

Hyunwoo had to grip the scratchy hotel comforter in a tight fist just to keep himself from grabbing Hyungwon, and the movement made Hyungwon shoot him an amused look. “’S okay,” he said, curling one hand at the base of Hyunwoo’s dick and jacking it once, as if testing. “I’m pretty good at this.” And then he swallowed Hyunwoo down as much as he could, mouth hot and wet and _real_ , there, and it was all Hyunwoo had in him to not thrust up into that movement.

It felt like years, but it was probably more like a few minutes before Hyungwon pulled off. “Okay, maybe I need more practice,” he muttered, rubbing at his jaw and giving Hyunwoo’s dick an apologetic lick, probably just to be an asshole. “Next time.”

Hyunwoo was pretty sure, at this point, that Hyungwon’s entire purpose on this earth was just to drive him crazy. He hauled Hyungwon back up and Hyungwon went easily, flopping on top of him to kiss him deeply.

He made a pleased noise when Hyunwoo gripped his ass and ground their hips together, and so he did it again. Soon they were barely kissing, more panting into each other’s mouths as Hyunwoo planted his feet against the mattress to get better positioned and move Hyungwon where he wanted to.

It was dizzying and amazing, how easy it was in this context to get Hyungwon to move the way he wanted. Hyunwoo felt drunk, a little, on the sheer power of making Hyungwon’s mouth hang open and his fingers twist against Hyunwoo’s shoulders.

Finally, Hyungwon’s head completely dropped against Hyunwoo’s neck, and his noises grew higher and more broken until he was shaking, mouth pressed open against Hyunwoo’s skin. Something about it triggered something in Hyunwoo, and he came with the last note of Hyungwon’s moans in his ear.

Coming down from it all, Hyungwon stayed lying limply on top of Hyunwoo. He was tall, so he was heavy, but not as bad as he could be considering he was mostly skin and bones.

Hyungwon shifted but didn’t move to get off of him, just snuffled and pushed his face further into the bend of Hyunwoo’s neck. The TV was still playing in the background, although Hyunwoo had practically forgotten it was on until just then.

Then, Hyungwon finally pushed himself up enough that he could peer down at Hyunwoo. His face was red but he didn’t look upset, or mad, just thoughtful. After a moment, he pouted his lips out. “I’m gonna have to do laundry now, you dick.”

Hyunwoo blinked up at him and then remembered that he had never actually gotten around to getting Hyungwon’s pants off. “Oh, um. Sorry.”

Hyungwon gave him a look, but then finally cracked into a smile. “I’m not sorry if you’re not.”

“Oh.” That – Hyunwoo wasn’t sorry. There was nothing sorry about how he felt right then, with Hyungwon heavy against him, warm and pleased and loose-boned. “Okay.”

Hyungwon ended up pulling him into the bathroom with him, and they made out in the shower just a little bit. Hyungwon stole a pair of shorts out of Hyunwoo’s suitcase that hung just a little loose on his hips but otherwise worked, and then he bullied Hyunwoo into his own bed.

“One of us will definitely end up on the floor if we share one,” Hyungwon said firmly, but then bent easily anyways when Hyunwoo pressed a questioning kiss at the skin behind his ear. “Stop, I want to sleep, you punk.”

“Okay.” Hyunwoo couldn’t help but grin dopily at Hyungwon, who looked red but fond. “G’night, then.”

“Night, dork.”

 

They were back on the road by nine the next morning, which was impressive if you knew Hyungwon at all. He still didn’t really wake up until after they had already been driving for an hour or so, and by that time they were essentially almost there.

“This traffic sucks,” Hyungwon grumbled when they hit northern Maryland. They were off-and-on in standstill traffic, and he had apparently decided to take it as a personal insult.

“People are going to work, you know.”

“It’s like eleven, who’s going to work now?”

“I dunno. Look, it’s moving again, we’re fine.”

Hyungwon huffed but went back to his phone, because he had once again been denied driving. “If you say so.”

The traffic lightened up a bit, although it was still slow going once they actually got to the edge of D.C. Hyungwon ended up convincing Hyunwoo to stop at a metro station and take the train into the city, which he mostly succeeding in doing because he was managing to be a complete pain in the ass.

“I still think you were being immature. You could have just stayed on one radio station; you didn’t _have_ to keep it on scan the entire time.”

“I’m good at getting what I want.” Hyungwon shot him a haughty look as he pushed through a crowd of tourists to get to the ticket stalls. “Plus, who’s the one who brought his Smart Trip card? Me, right?”

Hyunwoo just rolled his eyes and paid the extra for the paper ticket. “You’re buying lunch, then.”

Neither of them had really said anything about what had happened the past night. It was there underneath their skin, in the way that Hyunwoo nudged Hyungwon to the side when they got in the metro train so he wouldn’t bump into a group of businessmen, and in the tone of Hyungwon’s words whenever he teased Hyunwoo with something.

It was like a thin, fragile layer of ice had formed on the top of a pond, just barely protecting the movements of the fish that still swam underneath it all. Hyunwoo didn’t think he wanted to be the first person to crack that ice.  

He still pressed a hand to Hyungwon’s back when he almost lost his balance as the train pulled away from the station, though, because he would have done that anyways. Before.

They got off once they hit the Archives station and Hyungwon followed Hyunwoo to the National Gallery. It was a weekday, so it was mostly full of school tour groups, but it was alright.

Once they got inside Hyungwon took charge, grabbing a map but not actually opening it and instead heading straight upstairs.

“I don’t actually know anything about art,” Hyungwon threw over his shoulder as they climbed the stairs. “I just think it’s more interesting than old stuff.”

“I hate to break it to you,” Hyunwoo said, and quickly looked away from Hyungwon’s ass when they passed an elderly tour group going down the stairs on the other side of them, “but some of this art is probably pretty old too.”

Hyungwon flapped a hand at him, and led the way to the first set of exhibits.

It was nice, Hyunwoo decided, trailing after Hyungwon through the rooms of paintings and sculptures and old jewelry. Hyungwon had gotten a kind of quiet focus about him when they entered the gallery, and he looked effortlessly handsome in a kind of scholarly way.

Hyunwoo found himself looking at Hyungwon’s profile more than the actual paintings, which was stupidly romantic of him in a way that shouldn’t have surprised him so much.

The thing, Hyunwoo realized as the wandered through the connecting hallway to the second building, was that he really, really wanted to hold Hyungwon’s hand.

The thought of it hit him like a snowball, not that hard but still dripping cold down his spine. They hadn’t talked, and so Hyunwoo really had no idea where they stood.

He must have been staring harder than normal, because Hyungwon glanced back at him as they took the escalator up from the food court. “Everything alright?” he said, tone soft like they were in a library even as a group of preteen girls pounded past them.

Hyunwoo wasn’t sure, was the thing.

“Let’s go to the gift shop,” he said instead. “I should probably get my mom something.”

Hyungwon looked at him like he didn’t buy the change of subject, but he let Hyunwoo do it anyways.

The problem, Hyunwoo thought, was that now that he’d kissed Hyungwon once, he couldn’t stop wanting to kiss him again. He wanted to kiss him next to the bookshelves in the gift shop, he wanted to kiss him in the sculpture gallery that he didn’t understand the meaning of, he wanted to kiss him on the sidewalk as they walked back to the metro.

It was really, really distracting.

“We’re not far from your place, really,” Hyungwon said, breaking through the distracted haze of Hyunwoo’s thoughts. “We could really just go back tonight.”

Hyunwoo blinked back to the present and glanced at the time on his phone. “Traffic’ll be bad at this time of day.”

“Not by the time we actually get back to your car.” Hyungwon seemed to think of something, and he shrugged jerkily. “I mean. You can just drop me off at my apartment. It’s kind of on the way.”

It wasn’t, really, but. “No, um. I don’t mind you crashing for the night.”

“No, it’s fine.” Hyungwon pushed his hands into his pockets and picked up the pace of his walking, forcing Hyunwoo to speed up to match him. “You’re probably sick of me, after this whole week, anyways.” He laughed, a little strained.

“What?” Hyunwoo hurried to catch up with him, which was hard just because Hyungwon’s legs were so stupidly long. “I’m not sick of you, though?”

“Right.” Hyungwon was avoiding his eyes, for some reason, now. “Anyways. You can just drop me off.”

“Why are you being weird now?”

Hyungwon snorted and took a sharp left to go down the stairs at the metro stop that they had reached without Hyunwoo realizing it. “How am I being weird? Maybe I just want to go home.”

Hyunwoo watched Hyungwon push through the entrance way to the station dumbly. “Did I miss something? What’d I do?”

“Why do you think you did something?” Hyungwon kept going, leaving Hyunwoo to have to jog to catch up with him again after struggling his paper ticket out of his wallet and into the machine. “Not everything’s about you.”

“You of all people know I don’t think that.” Hyunwoo caught up and pulled Hyungwon to a stop by the wrist just as a train going the opposite way rushed away from the track. “What is it? Is this about, um, last night?”

Hyungwon’s lips were thin when he turned to face Hyunwoo properly. “No, it’s not.”

Wind blew Hyungwon’s hair across his forehead as their train pulled up to a stop, and it was the perfect timing for Hyungwon to turn away again as he pushed through the open doors. Hyunwoo followed, blankly, because what else was he going to do?

The ride back to their original station was quiet and tense. Hyungwon leaned against the railing in the handicapped spot while Hyunwoo gripped the center pole across from him, and tried and failed to make eye contact a few times before giving up on it.

This was one of the worst parts about being an idiot for Hyungwon, Hyunwoo thought bitterly as his stomach twisted in on itself. It was hard to want to impress someone who could go hot and cold in a split second like that.

Plus, another, deeper part of his mind whispered, now he knew how it was to make this person go completely warm and limp and boneless with content. Confronting him now, like this, icy and closed-off, was somehow harder than ever.

He didn’t try to say anything else to Hyungwon. They got to their stop, got off the metro, and found Hyunwoo’s car in the parking garage. Hyungwon slid into his seat and buckled his seat belt and didn’t look at Hyunwoo, and he wished it didn’t feel like such a punch to the throat.

The traffic wasn’t as bad as it could have been, as they pulled back onto the highway heading south to Hyungwon’s apartment. Hyunwoo turned the radio on just because the silence felt like it was eating away at the edges of everything, and Hyungwon tipped his head against the window.

It was awful.

Finally, close to 10 at night, they pulled into Hyungwon’s apartment complex. Hyunwoo parked where he usually did whenever he visited and then just turned to Hyungwon, who blinked blearily out the window before moving to get out.

“Are we going to talk about this at all?”

Hyungwon turned his gaze to Hyunwoo but looked as if he hadn’t even registered what he’d said. “About what?”

And really that was about all Hyunwoo felt like dealing with. “About last night. About this whole trip, about us kissing and – and everything else. Are we going to talk about it?”

Hyungwon’s expression didn’t change much but his ears started going just slightly red. “What do we need to talk about?”

“Why are you being so annoying about this? Why the fuck did you take me on this trip in the first place?” Hyungwon rolled his eyes and moved to get out of the car, and Hyunwoo followed. “I’m not leaving until you talk to me.”

“Fine,” Hyungwon replied, rounding on him. “What do you want to know? Why I wanted to leave in the first place? Why I didn’t want to come back? Why I brought you with me? I have no fucking clue, okay, it seems like a fucking awful idea in retrospect.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Hyunwoo realized dimly that he was being probably too loud for a public space, but Hyungwon was going to unlock his door and if he let him get inside there was no guarantee when the next time he’d get a chance to figure this all out would be. “Why are you running away from me?”

“I’m not,” Hyungwon bit out, fumbling with his keys before he managed to actually get his door open, “running away. I just spent a whole fucking week with you, if I wanted to run away I wouldn’t have asked you to go with me in the first place.”

“Okay,” Hyunwoo continued, and followed Hyungwon inside when Hyungwon made no motion to stop him. “So let’s start there. Why did you ask me?”

Hyungwon threw his keys down on his kitchen table and then went to dig busily through a pile of mail that was sitting on the counter, all without looking at Hyunwoo. “I had some shit I had to work out, alright. It didn’t work, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Hyunwoo repeated, and followed close behind Hyungwon as he paced out from his kitchen and into his bedroom. “What do you mean, it didn’t work?”

“Because if it had,” Hyungwon finally said, and turned to face him. “If it had worked, I wouldn’t have kissed you, alright?”

It was sickeningly like a knife to the gut, that sentence. “What does that mean?”

Hyungwon’s posture was tight as a wire stretched between two posts, vibrating and tense. “I thought I just had to get it through my thick skull,” he said through gritted teeth, “that I was being an idiot, okay? I thought that I would get sick of you if I spent that much time with you, or that you would get sick of me, or both. That would be ideal, actually.”

Hyunwoo still felt like the floor had been yanked out from underneath him. “What?”

“I’m an idiot, okay? I’m an idiot and I’ve been in fucking love with you for _years_ now, and you never even noticed that I liked guys, you didn’t notice _any_ of it.” Hyungwon’s eyes dropped to flit unsteadily around the room, and he shoved his hair back from his forehead. “And it didn’t work, I didn’t get sick of you because you’re a fucking Disney prince and you _tolerate_ me so fucking much. Fuck you for that, by the way, and fuck you for letting me kiss you, and fuck you for liking guys and _telling me_ , because now I just can’t stop thinking about any of it.”

He continued, bulldozing through the silence and still not looking at Hyunwoo. “I’m just so tired, of my job, of trying to avoid you but then just crawling back because you’re so _nice_ , okay? I wanted to get out of this town and away from my job and I wanted to, I don’t know, overdose on exposure to you because I thought that would help, somehow.”

Hyungwon’s posture finally loosened but it was defeated, and he crossed his arms defensively in front of his chest. “And it didn’t. It didn’t help, it made everything worse, and I want you to leave before I get more ideas about all of this.”

Hyunwoo felt – he felt like his brain was buffering, that he was a few sentences behind what Hyungwon was actually saying. And then it was skipping, scratching to a halt, because – “You’re in love with me?”

Hyungwon looked up at Hyunwoo and his eyes were bright and angry. “Yes, okay, and I’d appreciate if you didn’t rub it in. Or, really, address it at all. I’d really like if you just left, actually.”

Hyunwoo couldn’t do much but shake his head a little, still catching up. “Wait. You – that’s why you wanted me to kiss you, then?”

Hyungwon scoffed and tossed his head in a way that would look impressive and arrogant if his expression wasn’t so bitter. “I was drunk, and you had just told me that you liked guys, and I was feeling weak about it all. You didn’t have to let me kiss you.”

“Why wouldn’t I have?”

“Because.” Hyungwon blinked at him, eyebrows knitting together in the middle a little bit. “Because I’m an awful friend, because you don’t like me that much or you would have, I don’t know, _done_ something about it.”

And that was just so dumb that Hyunwoo almost laughed, punched-out. “Done something about it? Me? Hyungwon,” he continued, and he could feel his voice getting stupid and adrenaline-drunk. “Hyungwon, I never did anything because I never knew you liked guys.”

“And that’s the other thing,” Hyungwon retorted, voice loud. “How could you never notice? I wasn’t exactly keeping that whole thing a secret.”

“I’m an idiot, remember?”

Hyungwon leveled a finger at him, frown still firmly in place. “Even you aren’t that dense, you know.” Then he paused, and straightened a little. “Wait. What do you mean, that’s why you never did anything?”

It was moments like this one that Hyunwoo realized that neither grad school nor a business degree made one actually smart, in any way, at all. “Because I’ve been stupidly in love with you for ages.” He took a second to relish the way that Hyungwon’s face dropped open, unguarded for a second, and then continued. “I don’t even know how long, right? I’ve just – I’ve always wanted to impress you, or do things for you. It’s just always been like that for me.”

Hyunwoo shrugged, and shoved his hands in his pockets, nervousness now beginning to flood alongside the adrenaline as he kept going. “I kind of think that I never noticed you liked guys because it was easier to just think it was all impossible, anyways. I mean, look at you.” He gestured a little vaguely at Hyungwon. “Right?”

Hyungwon, for his part, still looked a bit like someone who had maybe seen a ghost. Finally, he seemed to find his voice, and pointed a shaking finger at him again. “You, Son Hyunwoo,” he said, “Better not be fucking with me right now.”

Hyunwoo grinned, just a little, carefully. “I haven’t been able to fuck with you since I first met you, Choi Hyungwon,” he said, voice miles steadier than he actually felt. His heart pounded like it wanted to leap out of his ribcage and onto the floor in between the two of them. “How do you think I would be able to start now?”

Hyungwon’s eyes narrowed, but he took one step forward, and then another until he was close enough to jab his finger at Hyunwoo’s sternum accusingly. “I don’t know. You’ve gotten braver lately,” he said, but there was just the suggestion of an upturn to the corner of his mouth that made Hyunwoo’s stomach jump up to his throat. “I’ve learned not to underestimate you.”

Hyunwoo slowly, carefully, reached up with one hand to brush the back of Hyungwon’s neck with his knuckles and watched the way that the touch made Hyungwon’s entire posture soften, a little. “In that case,” he said, moving more to cup the back of his neck in his palm and press the pad of his thumb to the sensitive skin behind Hyungwon’s ear. “Can I do something brave now?”

Hyungwon’s eyes had gotten wider the closer that Hyunwoo moved, and they went even rounder and more knowing with that question. He tipped his chin up so he could look down his nose a bit at Hyunwoo, but his hand was trembling when he went to touch Hyunwoo’s side, just barely. “Depends. Are you just going to talk about it all day, or actually do it?”

Kissing Hyungwon this time, Hyunwoo thought, as he pressed close and wrapped his free arm around Hyungwon’s waist, was like coming home.

This time, the second their mouths met Hyungwon went easily and completely soft in his arms, resistance and tenseness gone and replaced by a kind of frantic, flickering, sweet energy. He seemed to not be able to stop moving, to stop his hands from going from Hyunwoo’s waist to his arms to his shoulders.

Eventually they settled, his arms slung over Hyunwoo’s shoulders just like they had been back in Jooheon’s kitchen.

He thought, briefly, of a firefly flickering in the night sky. He thought of the loud crash of the ocean waves, and of the steady thrum of the baseline of Kihyun’s band in that bar. Of the way that the lights of the second motel had played against the dip of Hyungwon’s lower back that night, the night that already felt like years ago even though it was only, fuck, just last night.

He thought of how distant Hyungwon had seemed that night even longer ago, over the phone at three in the morning with the buzz of strangers in the background of the other end of the line. How close Hyungwon felt now, skin warm and alive under his hands.

Hyungwon was right, Hyunwoo thought, as he let himself get pulled towards the bed. He had gotten braver, lately.

**Author's Note:**

> The legendary showhyung roadtrip fic that I've been complaining about on [twitter](https://twitter.com/ponyoprince) for months now. I love these two. I love misunderstandings/pining. I love Google Maps.
> 
> Title comes from [Great Divide](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mON_egEXyN0) by Ira Wolf. I didn't hear this song til halfway through writing this monster, but it's VERY much this fic.
> 
> Please feel free to come say hi on my twitter, or on my [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/ponyoprince)! I love showhyung and I love talking about showhyung.


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